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Things v Objects - Rikke Hansen on the public life of things

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Things v Objects - Rikke Hansen on the public life of things

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Rikke Hansen on the public life of things
Terms such as 'participation' and 'dialogue' have come to dominate the discussion that surrounds the so-called socially engaged art practices of the late 1990s and the 2000s. According to such rhetorics, the artist is an engineer of situations, setting up contexts in which passive spectators become active participants and co-creators of the work in question. It is a debate that has, so far, had little to say about the props that make up the stage set for these acts. Instead, objects are seen, at best, as necessary middle-men that work as catalysts for conversation or, at worst, as the last obstacles obstructing otherwise unmediated interactions. I want to focus on the life of 'things' in the social world and, more specifically, what happens to things when they get transported into the context of socially engaged art practices.

The problem with an approach that reduces everything to a question of the power of subjects (artists, participants, and so on) is that very little sets one artwork apart from the next. Dissatisfied with the mere appropriation of the existing art terminology, Grant Kester has, in his book Conversation Pieces, attempted to develop a framework for what he calls 'dialogical aesthetics', an aesthetic model of communicative interaction, and an axis on which we may place individual artworks according to how successful they are at establishing dialogue. There are, of course, criteria of judgment; he likes the community-oriented work by Jay Koh more than the convivial food-sharing situations set up by Rirkrit Tiravanija because the former is seen to engage more directly with his immediate social surroundings. Miwon Kwon has expressed concern with Kester's theories that, in her view, seek to essentialise cultural and social identity; it is too easy, she claims, if not directly unavoidable, for the artist to tap into preconceived, hegemonic and apparently coherent ideas of what constitutes the social.

The point here, however, is not whether Kester or Kwon, or most others who have contributed to these debates, are right but that such arguments tend to cut out half of the equation by sidelining the material things that are either part of the stage set to begin with or produced from the encounter itself. The locus of democracy may well, as Claude Lefort argues, be an empty space, but the actors who come to claim a public life are of both human and non-human kinds; it is a space thick with things; we might call it an assemblage. If the theoretical framework that seeks to capture this set of very diverse practices ends up resorting to false coherency, then maybe this is because it relies on an outdated idea of what constitutes an actor or an actant in a social setting.

In her recent book On the Style Site, Ina Blom goes in search of the non-human 'missing masses' in recent art practice. It is a welcome contribution to the discussions surrounding contemporary art's alleged social turn. Style, for Blom, is a site within the social, or rather, it is an access point to the social and, as such, what unites human subjects and inanimate objects. The self, no longer securely anchored deep within the subject, propels itself forward through continuous, reflexive self-forming. Similarly, it is through design, through appearance, that the inanimate object comes to have a public life. Advertising increasingly makes use of terminologies that describe products as if they were living beings. We are told to expect high levels of performance from our cars, our computers, and so on, and we tend to swear at them when they fail to meet these expectations. Performance, as a stylised mode of appearing in the world, is no longer reserved for human subjects.

In some ways there is little which is novel here. Speaking at the anniversary of The People's Paper in 1856, Karl Marx stated that 'all our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life and in stultifying human life into material force'. However, Blom is less concerned with questions of alienation and deskilled workforces (issues that are very much at the heart of the dialogical practices described by Kester) and more interested in uncovering the affective life of things in the public realm. This leads her to include artworks in her argument which may not usually be seen to fall under the headings of 'socially engaged', 'relational' or 'conversational' art practices. It is an approach that, nonetheless, makes sense; if the problem with current debates is that they take their cue from a highly anthropocentric set of beliefs, then any argument that sets out to counter this cannot simply demarcate its field using the same rules of selection. There are a few teething problems here, though, but I will get to those later.

So far I have described things and objects as if the terms were interchangeable. There are, however, important differences: while a thing suggests a series of relations to the world, the term 'object' implies the performative amputation of such relationality. In his seminal article 'Thing Theory', Bill Brown describes how things get in the way; they either have too much presence or too little. The move from object to thing and back again is never an innocent affair. Things continually get reduced to objects in those powerhouses we call parliaments and courtrooms. To present an object as a matter of fact is to ignore the (at times political) interests, speculations and calculations that have gone into severing its connections to a life-world. By contrast, the etymological root of the word 'thing' implies a gathering or an assemblage in the form of a council, and in most Scandinavian languages the word for thing, ting, still has this double meaning.

Bruno Latour has made much of the power of things, not least in Making Things Public, a book and an exhibition that, in 2005, came out of his collaborations with the conceptual artist Peter Weibel. Latour's actor-network theory seeks not to discriminate between humans and nonhumans, animate and inanimate actors, but centres on the way things do things, on the effects that produce them and the affects they themselves produce, the way in which they become matters of concern rather than matters of fact. His ideas have mainly caught the attention of sociologists and political philosophers but in recent years they have been taken up by the arts. The concern with 'things' is, nonetheless, hardly new to art. In 1925 the Soviet constructivist Boris Arvatov famously described the thing as being 'connected like a co-worker with human practice'. The art-historical legacy of the readymade at first seems to run in the same vein. It is, however, a very different concern, one that has more to do with institutional critique than with 'thingpower'. At the same time, Claes Oldenburg's oversized, anthropomorphised objects are visual reminders of the affect of things. Their theatricality inverts a child's fantasy; in Oldenburg's world objects do not come to life after everyone else has gone to bed; instead, giant soft light switches finally relax, letting it all 'hang out', after a long day's performance.

A recent turn to 'things' in art, one that I think has a bearing on the way we perceive and critique the social, can be seen in works that engage directly with the form of sociality that is produced by things; artworks that, momentarily, make objects stand out against the backdrop of everyday life. In effect, while such works do not necessarily 'look like' the kind of works Kester and Kwon bring into their arguments, I would argue that they nonetheless address or embrace issues of sociality.

Copy Right is a work by the artist group Superflex from 2007. It consists of 80 mass-produced chairs, each of which the artists have cut into the shape of an iconic Arne Jakobsen chair. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the work is crudely done; chairs usually invite you to sit, but here the rough edges threaten to ruin your clothes. Scattered on the floor are all the cut-away pieces. While the assemblage resembles the spatial set-up of a seminar room, the work is clearly marked by a white square beneath the chairs, dividing what is art from what is not. You may sit, but just not right here. Where the legacy of the readymade borrowed from the aesthetics of the legal system through the artist's use of the signature - as a gesture that at once authenticated the work and critiqued the power of such authentication - Copy Right works through a sort of de-patenting, the patent being one of the points where law concerns itself directly with the structure of the commodity. It must be assumed that Jakobsen's original design is patented to protect it from any rip-offs; yet, patenting a design or an object, freezing it in its objecthood so to speak, inevitably opens up the possibility of producing something which is almost the same but not quite, since a patent in order to work has to be specific, that is, it must be distinguishable from that which it does not include. The chairs in Copy Right may not invite you to sit but they do invite you to 'make one yourself'. Something, or rather some thing, escapes the process of patenting.

The stylistics of the piece, however, at first make it look slightly atypical of the group's practice, which has often been described as operating within an actual lifeworld through a direct engagement with the social, a practice concerned more with actual doings than with representation and appearance. But as Blom points out, the activities of Superflex were never devoid of aesthetic environment and attention to style; and in other, ongoing projects, such as Supergas, Supercopy and Supersauna, the artists not only appropriate the aestheticised profiling tactics of large corporations, but intentionally exaggerate such strategies.

The ubiquity of chairs in public life is also the premise for Hans Schabus's recent installation at The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London. In Next Time I'm Here, I'll Be There, 2008, the artist gathered chairs from different spaces within the Barbican, from theatre seats to office chairs, and strapped them to the wall in a layout corresponding to the interior design of an aeroplane, a context in which under normal circumstances one would have very little choice but to sit down. In the booklet accompanying the exhibition Margit Emesz notes that 'chairs position us in a fixed frame, circumscribe distances and generate patterns of encounter, bringing people together, creating intimacy within groups, and influencing our actions, sensations and behaviour'. Chairs can work as disciplining instruments as well as props of hospitality. What Copy Right and Next Time I'm Here, I'll Be There have in common is that both works, even though in the case of the latter only temporarily, bring out the 'thingness' of objects by arresting the flow that characterises the distribution-consumption circuit. It could be argued that this kind of stoppage is very far from the processual, performative approaches described by Kester and Kwon; yet, I would claim that what we see in many of these socially engaged practices is a similar kind of slowing down of things, a temporary appearance of things on the stage of dialogical art practices, in which stylistics and comportments are shown to be central rather than derivative. And so, it could be said that the chairs in WochenKlausur's Intervention to Improve the Conduct of Public Debate, 2000, the image of which adorns Kester's Conversation Pieces, have for a short term been called upon to 'act' within this particular framework.

It is tempting, here, to dig out all the different artworks in which chairs appear, and there are quite a few, but this would be to miss the point. Blom herself plays a dangerous game when she appears to return thing-power to technological determinism. A considerable part of her book is devoted to what the author calls 'a memorial tour of lamps' in contemporary art, from Simon Starling's remakes of Poul Henningsen pendent lamps from discarded metal bowls and wok covers in his Work, Made-Ready, 2001, to Martin Creed's Turner Prize-winning lights going on and off in Work No. 127, 2001, to Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project, 2003, with its artificial sunset. But if style is what dictates substance and not the other way around, then power is not inherent in either subjects or objects; instead, power is and must always be seen as a relational matter. The attention to lamps comes across like a peculiar preoccupation with the taxonomy of a particular type of object and therefore does not sit well within the overall argument. There may well be many lamps in the work of Cerith Wyn Evans, another artist whom Blom mentions, but they seem to function more like mirrors or traps that take hold of viewers. Wyn Evans's work is characterised by contradictory systems of messaging, often transmitting invisible text via visible Morse code. Untitled (Takashimaya Rose), 2008, refers simultaneously to the logo of the Takashimaya department store in Japan and to numerous roses within art and literature. Here, it is the multilateral powers of things that hold the possibility for multiple coexisting socialities. As such, each layer of meaning is an invitation to enter into a particular form of sociality within the work, to claim an identity for oneself by becoming the addressee.

It would be easy to assert mastery over things by submitting them to a system of signification. But this accounts for little when it comes down to the actual engagement with the work. In much of the work that gets included in the woolly category of relational aesthetics things are often brought in as props to create what Gernot Böhme calls an 'aesthetic of atmospheres'. An atmosphere arises from a stage design without being locatable within any single object; it needs the presence of a subject but is also never determined by that subject alone and, as such, it combines production and reception aesthetics. Take, for example, Jim Lambie's sound-wavy, stripy floors that seem to grow from the object to include the viewer. Much of his work has musical references; they are 'acoustic atmospheres' which allow the sonic object to come forth by, paradoxically, silencing sound. What we encounter here is a space of moods. To be moved by a certain atmosphere, to attune one's mood to it, is to some extent to be beside oneself. There is recalcitrance in things; we lose ourselves in them.

A politics of sociality that centres on processuality is always full of things coexisting in complex, affective networks, making both the formation and destabilisation of subjectivity inseparable from our relations to things. The power of things is that they refuse to conform completely to our intentions and interpretations, to become the means to an end - even when we have designed them ourselves.

Rikke Hansen is a researcher based at Tate Britain.

First published in Art Monthly 318: Jul-Aug 2008.

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Rikke Hansen on the public life of things Terms such as 'participation' and 'dialogue' have come to dominate the discussion that surrounds the so-called socially engaged art practices of the late 1990s and the 2000s. According to such rhetorics, the artist is an engineer of situations, setting up contexts in which passive spectators become active participants and co-creators of the work in question.

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Communication and Collaboration between Humans and Objects and between Objects and Objects, Will Help Realize the Ideal Society of the Future

We asked Associate Professor Kazunori Takashio to describe the ideal society that will be brought about by the rich connectivity-of humans with objects, and of objects with objects-that he seeks in his ubiquitous computing research.

TAKASHIO, Kazunori

Faculty of Environment and Information Studies

What Ubiquitous Computing Can Do for Society

Sometimes, at a train station, when you're about to pass through an automatic ticket gate using your train fare smart card, the device fails to read the information. The barrier slams shut and you feel as though you're somehow in disgrace. It's not your fault that the card didn't scan, but when the gate snaps shut it makes you very conscious of everyone watching. That's just one example of the many situations where the interface with a device or system dictates the user's behavior. To improve these situations, we need computers that can adapt to human behavior; in other words, we need computer systems that can identify a person's circumstances in a more precise, context-aware way, plus highly developed communication between people and computers (objects). The terms "ubiquitous computing" and "ubiquitous networking" refer to computer and network services being accessible to (or accessed by) anybody, anywhere, anytime, without conscious effort. In our ubiquitous research, we envision a world where computers (objects) give humans the assistance they need based on this kind of accurate grasp of their circumstances.

The Last Remaining Issue: Object-to-Object Communication and Collaboration

The ultimate goal of ubiquitous computing research is to enrich communication in human society. We recognize three types of communication: human-to-human, human-to-object, and object-to-object. The human-to-human infrastructure has already reached a certain level due to the spread of the Internet, among other advances. And now we've made some headway at the next stage: research for richer connectivity between humans and objects. For example, if we have a person wear a sensor (an object), we can detect the information that they are walking, or sitting, or whatever they are doing, and if the room they are in has sensors installed at various points, we can obtain information about where they are sitting and what they are doing. At the next stage, when connectivity among objects becomes highly developed, it should be possible for objects to share information without human intervention, to predict what someone will do next based on the prior pattern of that person's daily life, and to provide help accordingly. Major functions can be performed by tiny computers whose individual functions are not at all complex, once they are distributed and enabled to communicate among themselves. Of course, it is important that this be done seamlessly and unobtrusively.

The Next Step in Ubiquitous Computing Research

At present, sensor data and their patterns yield simple information, such as the fact that a person is walking or sitting. But take an action like walking: you can observe what the person is doing now, but what they'll do next is highly mutable, depending on how they happen to feel at that moment. For example, if he's in a good mood a pedestrian might say "Excuse me" when he bumps into somebody, but at this moment he's in a bad mood and so he gets into an altercation. Present-day technology doesn't allow us to take into account this mental factor-people's moods-in predicting behavior patterns. And so I have started doing some research to obtain information on the mental factor. I'm still at the stage of basic experimentation, but in psychology there are advanced studies on inferring people's emotional state from signs like changes in heart rate, and in my work I am seeking to prove these inferences in real time using medical biosensors that monitor heart rate, skin temperature, and so on.

Until now, ubiquitous computing has tended to be associated with the "anybody, anywhere, anytime" model. What we foresee next is an "only for me, only here, only now" model, i.e., providing specific services to specific people at specific times and places. As a concrete example, let's take a system for monitoring children's safety. Children's behavior patterns show that when their attention focuses on one thing, they're heedless of their surroundings. Say a girl is waiting at the traffic lights and someone across the street calls to her, she is liable to disregard the red light and dash into traffic. If there were a computer system in the city streets that grasped this tendency of children, monitored their environs, and provided assistance the moment it was needed, it could perhaps prevent an accident in this case by changing the timing of the signals. In an experiment we did in the shopping district of the City of Akabane, in Tokyo, we ran an actual child monitoring service after installing ubiquitous network infrastructure in the streetlights when they were converted to LED lamps.

Looking Five and Ten Years into the Future

I expect the "smart town" concept, with small computers embedded in the city landscape, will eventually be realized everywhere. Picture the Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) five years from now: I imagine a whole infrastructure of sensors and small computers distributed all over campus, so that a student can use a smart phone or similar object to pluck information that meets his or her particular needs at any given moment. Then, if we picture society ten years from now, objects themselves may have become context-aware and they may have taken on identities. There may be tiny, rice-grain-sized computers with these capabilities embedded all over our cities, ready to provide support for human actions when the objects themselves judge it necessary. Moreover, the range of human perception may have been vastly extended by the development of sensors corresponding to our five senses and relay systems that convey the information they gather to remote locations as required. For example, a student on campus might be able to physically sense what is going on in his or her apartment. Enlarging our range of perception in these ways could even change human beings themselves; it could have a great impact on our sense of values.

100 Percent Tailored to Personal Specifications

SFC is often said to offer a very favorable research environment, and I have certainly found this to be so. For example, as I mentioned, I am exploring ways of obtaining information on the mental factor in human behavior patterns, although, as a subject, this is outside my specialty. However, thanks to having colleagues in a wide array of fields here at SFC, I can seek their advice and collaboration. Again, in the experiment where we put computers in streetlights, I don't have the background to look at the economic effects of the project, such as whether it has helped revitalize the shopping district, but I could work with an expert in that area. The possibility of such collaborations materializing right here on campus is a big advantage for the students, too. Also, having the opportunity to study a wide range of academic fields in such an interdisciplinary way means that they should be able to get what they really want from their studies. I would like them, during their time at SFC, to do some research that is 100 percent tailored to their own personal specifications. When they go out into the working world, they will inevitably have to make things whose specifications are the greatest common denominator, because they are to be used by many people. But while at university the students have a chance to create something to their own specifications, without compromises, and I hope they'll make the most of it.

A Brief Background of Associate Professor

TAKASHIO, Kazunori

Associate Professor Takashio received his bachelor's degree in 1990 from the Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University. He earned his PhD in computer science from Keio University in 1995. After serving as an assistant in the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Electro-Communications, University of Electro-Communications, and then as a Special Research Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University, he became Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies in 2005. He specializes in distributed and real-time systems and in mobile and ubiquitous computing. He has taken part in numerous research projects, including the 2002-2005 project titled Research on Ubiquitous Information Society Based on Collaboration among Humanity and Engineering Disciplines, sponsored by the Promotion of Advanced Research Program of the Special Coordination Funds for Promoting Science and Technology of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). Since 2006, he has been a member of Overlay-network Search Oriented for Information about Town Events (OSOITE), an Advanced Integrated Sensing Technology Project that forms part of the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).

Faculty Profile

(06 September 2011)

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Communication and Collaboration between Humans and Objects and between Objects and Objects, Will Help Realize the Ideal Society of the Future｜Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus

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We asked Associate Professor Kazunori Takashio to describe the ideal society that will be brought about by the rich connectivity-of humans with objects, and of objects with objects-that he seeks in his ubiquitous computing research.

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“A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself, it shouldn’t be concealed as part of a fairly different whole.” Donald Judd, The New York Times, 1964

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Donald Judd was one of the first artists to employ industrial fabricators in the construction of his sculptures, and to use ​"nonart" materials including Plexiglas, aluminum, and plywood. He created hollow, boxlike forms that fixed to the wall, stacked in a tower, or progressed across the floor, often immense in scale and incorporating strips and planes of color. His boxes measure and contain empty space, encouraging the viewer to investigate the open and closed volumes. In Table Objects, Judd created two almost identical folded structures to explore the different surfaces of aluminum and steel.

"A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself, it shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole." Donald Judd, The New York Times, 1964

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Donald Judd was one of the first artists to employ industrial fabricators in the construction of his sculptures, and to use ​"nonart" materials including Plexiglas, aluminum, and plywood. He created hollow, boxlike forms that fixed to the wall, stacked in a tower, or progressed across the floor, often immense in scale and incorporating strips and planes of color.

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Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics

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Is politics really nothing more than power relations, competing interests and claims for recognition, conflicting assertions of "simple" truths? No thinker has argued more passionately against this narrow view than Hannah Arendt, and no one has more to say to those who bring questions of meaning, identity, value, and transcendence to our impoverished public life.

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This article draws from Hannah Arendt's theory of "inter-est" to formulate a model of coalition discourse that can coarticulate difference and commonality and approach them as mutually nourishing conditions rather than as polarities. By disrupting the normative fantasies of unified, a priori subjectivity and universal truth, interest-based discourse facilitates political interactions that neither rely on sameness nor reify difference to the exclusion of connection.

Journal Information

The only journal for scholarly research at the intersection of philosophy and women's studies, Hypatia is a leader in reclaiming the work of women philosophers and is indispensable for those interested in philosophy.

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At the Table with Arendt: Toward a Self-Interested Practice of Coalition Discourse on JSTOR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This article draws from Hannah Arendt's theory of "inter-est" to formulate a model of coalition discourse that can coarticulate difference and commonality and approach them as mutually nourishing conditions rather than as polarities. By disrupting the normative fantasies of unified, a priori subjectivity and universal truth, interest-based discourse facilitates political interactions that neither rely on sameness nor reify difference to the exclusion of connection.

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Oase 106: Table Settings - Reflections On Architecture With Hannah Arendt

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The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) once stated that spatial thinking is 'political' thinking, as it is concerned about the world and its inhabitants. We certainly can understand spatial thinking here as architectural thinking: the '

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The other day Kourosh-- also known as Cyrus the Great-- and I were having a discussion about the fact that my new passport has a microchip in it. It seems, I said, that at least from here, there is a real absence of any kind of political dialog about the turn our country has taken-- from microchips and offshore prisons to a war that few people actually seem to even support. Kourosh wondered whether his own stance that "this (evil) too shall pass" was apathetic or not. This reminded me of a radio show that I listened to the other week on Australia Broadcasting Corporation's The Philosophers Zone about Hannah Arendt .

Hannah Arendt, born of Jewish parents in Germany, grew up just in time for Hitler's regime. A student of the great Karl Jaspars, she was perhaps most famously the lover of Martin Heidegger. Having to flee Germany and then France for America, Arendt remained (for obvious reasons) deeply bitter about Heidegger and Jaspars stance (alternating support and then complete political withdraw) concerning Hitler and the Nazi regime. Afterall, of all people, shouldn't those people devoted to a life of contemplation (philosophers) be the first to stand up for what is right in the face of such overwhelming evil?

She is one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers. And though she was to live out her days in the United States, she remained committed to to practicing philosophy in the continental tradition (something seemingly almost impossible to do in contemporary America). In this European tradition, rather than working to construct philosophical systems which are rooted strictly in logic and a priori concepts, Arendt, like the greatest modern European philosophers, was committed to "doing philosophy" in a manner that is born out of one's own experience (that is, phenomenology).

In that way, her thinking is inextricably bound with that of Heidegger's as well as in her own experiences as a victim of the Nazis. She is, indeed, like many European philosophers concerned with our POLITICAL condition (and that means, she is, like Aristotle, concerned with our SHARED human experience). That is to say, really, that if thought does not somehow inspire action, if one does not lead a life of action ( vita activa) then our thinking will remain impoverished (this is the great rejection of Plato).

This leads me to the point of the radio program where the host and guest talk about Arendt's very famous quote about the Banality of Evil . After a dramatic kidnapping in South America, the Israeli government brings Nazi master-mind Eichmann back to Israel to stand trial for his crimes againt Jewry and all humanity. Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to cover the trial, and reporting for the New Yorker, she made the famous comment that rather than sounding like some kind of madman, in fact what really struck her was the "banality of his speech." Accepting that many involved in evil acts are just robots or cogs in the wheel, still the show's host, Alan Saunders, persists that there are others who perform immoral acts on the basis of careful thought. How can that be, he asks? What, then, is the role of thought?

"Alan Saunders: Just finally, the great tragedy, or one of the great tragedies, there were quite a lot of contenders for the title, but one of the great tragedies of the 20th century to which she was witness, and of which she was to some extent a victim, a lot of it's about people like Hitler, Houston Chamberlain, the anti-Semitic theorist, even Wagner: a lot of it is about people sitting in rooms, thinking, and thinking the wrong thoughts. It's not all about people like Eichmann whom you can say are mechanics, are just getting on with the job, or just obeying orders. It is actually people thinking quite hard, but thinking badly.

Max Deutscher: Well she has quite a lot to say about that. As I say I've already indicated that she can be fully critical of a life of thought of a certain sort. If thought, to simplify, is a kind of inner conversation, this has implications. How do we get to think well? Well, we stand in need of the other, right? We need to be conversing with others. That sounds innocent and easy, but it isn't, as people find when they try. You know, things blow up, or the other person refuses to be thoughtful. So you get a kind of symbiotic relationship I suppose that my thinking well depends on the quality of my conversations with others. But it's not simply a one-way process as if thinking were a mere ghost of the full-blooded conversation with another, because the conversation with another that has any success is thoughtful, is borrowing upon my inner life as well, and so it's if you like, it's the preparedness to spend that time of what may be quite hard work thinking about the problems that arise at the conversational level, at the literally conversational level, that we refine and moderate our language and approach in order, if you like, that our conversations be more successful. None of this guarantees a good politics, and no-one has a guarantee for a good politics, but if one thinks of some of the characters you're talking about, they are people who are not working out their ideas adequately in close critical contact with others."

I suppose in this way, I do feel uncomfortable with Kourosh's apathetic response that "this too shall pass." This is because, above and beyond the political implications from such a stance is this role of conversation with the Other as being somehow critical to forming true judgements. For, I do believe that even "just talking" about philosophical or political issues is in some way-- while maybe actually effecting nothing at all- at least it involves some kind of faculty of judgement, and such discussions are therefore essential to our thinking processes and our moral lives.

But do conversations growing out of the inner life of individuals really take place anymore? This leads to what philosopher's describe as our contemporary sense of alienation whereby dialog comes down to a narrating of events (what I did last weekend). That is, discussion becomes dominated by that which has NOT been filtered through one's inner life.

Arendt concluded that Eichmann was-- as a kind of cog in the wheel (just a guy doing his job??) incapable of "exercising the kind of judgement that would have made his victims' suffering real or apparent for him." That is, "it was not the presence of hatred that enabled Eichmann to perpetrate the genocide, but the absence of the imaginative capacities that would have made the human and moral dimensions of his activities tangible for him."

What is called for then? Individuals who are both willing to think (and are committed to having rich inner lives) as well as individuals who are committed to our shared experience via dialog ( vita activa).

Hannah Arendt was chided by her publisher for wanting to call Eichmann "thoughtless," since that word (in English) really is used lightly to chastise children or someone considered rude. At the same time, though, in my opinion the word is exactly on target-- for truly there was a total lack of any thought. Eichmann was, as Arendt argued beautifully, bereft of the ability to have "an internal dialogue with himself, which would have permitted self-awareness of the evil nature of his deeds." This inability, she says, "amounted to a failure to use self-reflection as a basis for judgement, the faculty that would have required Eichmann to exercise his imagination so as to contemplate the nature of his deeds from the experiential standpoint of his victims."

It really, then, comes down again to the heart (our inner lives and imagination). The ability to look at the world from another's point of view in an imaginative way. Kant required this of us, and perhaps such dialogs-- even in times where we think "nothing will come of it;" well, still such dialogs serve an important purpose. Arendt put it beautifully, calling such conversations that arise out of our contemplative lives as 'To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one's imagination to go visiting'.

Yes, the heart too needs to go visiting...

For a discussion of the banality of evil in terms of money and the arms trade, see .

***

"The Unexamined life is not worth living"-- Socrates

(A few days later): This whole discussion of the need for discussion which is filtered through our inner lives and our own inner dialogs reminded me of Socrates (perhaps my favorite Greek). Plato described him as saying that, "taking time everyday to DISCUSS questions of the basic values that shape your life is the best thing you can do to improce the qualty of your own life."

I think its interesting that Socrates chose to use the word "discuss" rather thank just to think about. I suppose-- like Arendt (who was deeply indebted to Socrates) that it was this shared understanding that was so essential to our moral lives. And to Socrates a life of virtue was equivalent to the Good Life. His concept of prtotecting our own souls from damage (whereby only the agent herself can damage her own soul) is very interesting-- as is the concept that the Good Life lies in our own choices-- right down to the end.

And speaking of the end. What a way to go! A cup of Hemlock poised at his lips, he smiles and says, "Tell Crito I owe a cock to Asclepius"

Here is a In our Times program about Socrates:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20070927.shtml
And the Philosophers Zone program (aired on my birthday last year):

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2007/1870416.htm

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The other day Kourosh-- also known as Cyrus the Great-- and I were having a discussion about the fact that my new passport has a microchip in it. It seems, I said, that at least from here, there is a...

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"The real strength to me of artworks that engage the social or political is putting something on the table that is often impoverished – the ability to imagine another future, or even a methodology to get there."

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On August 9, 2013 Deborah Fisher, Executive Director of A Blade of Grass posted a link to Ben Davis's article, "A Critique of Social Practice Art: What does it mean to be a political artist?" which appeared in issue #90 of the International Socialist Review on her Facebook page. To her pleasant surprise, it generated a flurry of responses and counter-responses that began to gel together into a full-fledged debate on the value and practice of socially engaged art.

We were so excited by the conversation that we decided to share it with you. What follows is the initial Facebook debate, seen through the lenses of three of the participants' Facebook pages: those of Tom Finkelpearl (Director of the Queens Museum), Deborah Fisher, and artist Rick Lowe. They have been joined by Ben Davis (Executive Editor, Blouin Artinfo), Nato Thompson (Chief Curator, Creative Time) and Elizabeth Grady (Programs Director, ABOG). A few key posts by others appear below, as well.

The texts below are organized based on the person whose Facebook page they echo. Ben has been gracious enough to offer an initial response - thanks, Ben!
We want to hear your thoughts! Join the conversation in the Comments section!
DEBORAH FISHER'S FACEBOOK PAGE
Deborah Fisher Well...I don't think Nato Thompson would suggest that an artistic gesture can be intrinsically radical or anti-capitalist. But Davis is right to ask what separates SEA (Socially Engaged Art -ed.) from other types of social action and social work. Why is its status as art important? What does calling it art accomplish? August 9

Nato Thompson Thanks Deborah. I must say that I have to make it clear, that issue of whether or not something is art is hardly the central concern. That is not ultimately what is at stake. For many artists and non-artists, the concerns are much broader. I certainly have little interest in calling most stuff art or not. That category is contingent and contextual. You know, I think the mistake is to position the idea of art as something that intrinsically exists. It is a myopic discussion to reduce SEA to the consideration of "Is it art or not". That debacle is as old as the sage Brecht vs. Adorno battles. I think that, if anything, socially engaged art points out the obvious fact that there is a crisis of cultural production. I don't think we benefit from calling this stuff art. What we can do is realize that the social terrain is shifting and people are using culture in new ways to do stuff in the world (this goes much further than art). Davis makes it seem as though only SEA suffers from the need for funding and funders... Isn't this the crisis of contemporary life writ large? Is there a part of living that is somehow excluded from this obvious dilemma? Are there other, more pure forms of art that he has in mind that somehow escape this situation? Is Occupy somehow removed from the same problematics? As opposed to wondering whether or not something is art, we must try to tease out how to navigate the crisis that is the incorporation of cultural production into the very machinations of power. SEA isn't the solution, but it does point toward an exacerbation of the problem. Pretending that one can go back to business as usual (which is at heart what Davis is opining) adds nothing to the conversation. August 10 at 10:49am

Deborah Fisher Hey Nato, thanks for stopping by!

I think there's a difference between asking if SEA is art or not, and asking what calling something art accomplishes and whether the designation of art is useful.

Whether you want to call it art or not, and I get why you don't, SEA projects are often categorized and funded as art. With this categorization comes a specific relationship to power; a pool of established funding and other resources; a set of expectations about both meaning and efficacy... Etc.

You're complicit in this. Creative Time is an arts organization. Immigrant Movement International is funded as an art project. So am I-ABOG is an arts funder, we are going to give 70% of our grant funds out as fellowships to individual artists next year-this empowerment of individuals doesn't really happen to the degree it does in the arts in other funding landscapes.

I agree that whether or not something is art has been a boring, unsatisfying question for a very long time, and I enjoy and appreciate your focus on how we live in relationship to power. I think it's a useful idea. For that matter, I also think that Davis is presenting a laundry list of issues that kind of traps cultural workers into thinking that power is always bad rather than shifting the conversation.

But you know, his list is a lot like the list of issues we've been kicking around all summer at ABOG HQ as we work toward rolling out this fellowship program.

I don't think my organization can take the political nature of this work seriously, fund it thoughtfully, and meaningfully assess what these projects can and cannot do unless we are fully accountable to the power we have as funders, and the way art functions not only within a marketplace but as a symbol that distances the powerful from their own ideology.

And I believe there are real opportunities to be found to expand this dialogue past SEA as social work if we can be clear about the way art shapes our expectations of impact, and what we can give a larger discussion about how arts philanthropy works.

This is getting really long, but basically I don't think ABOG can get to understanding or measuring anything resembling your "how we live" perspective without deploying art as a framing device because of the real limitations Davis addresses in his article.

Anyway, happy to keep chatting about this! August 10 at 2:16pm via mobile

Nato Thompson I think the trick is that we are not talking about a field unrelated to art. It is just a different beast. Many of these projects use cultural production (a word I like more than art) at some point in their process. Artists are not alone in using culture to do things. Using the symbolic, the formal, the poetic alongside the didactic, the infrastructural, and activist are simply contemporary ways of doing things. The field of SEA is often artists and activists catching up to the fact that a hybrid form of aesthetic and political production is how the world works. To talk about efficacy is difficult because outside of capitalism, we have very few metrics for the production of subjectivity. Capitalism at least has math. But the production of a more compelling, open-minded, liberated experience is very hard to prove. This isn't just the difficulty faced by contemporary culture makers but educators as well. How would Paolo Freire produce proof of his liberatory pedagogy? Certainly consistent processes over time are useful in analyzing, but even short lived one-off things (art projects) mixed in with the great stew of other processes have their own, very hard to assess, results. August 11 at 10:04am

Tom Finkelpearl Hey Nato and Deborah - It seems that the only sort of art Ben Davis would endorse is the art that would lead directly to the end of capitalism. What does that art look like? Is it disengaged? If it is engaged, is it not co-opted? In our jobs at Creative Time, A Blade of Grass and the Queens Museum we are constantly in the position of saying publicly what we are for, not just what we are against. So, Ben Davis, if you are against Project Row Houses, what art are you for? (By the way, I think the article is well worth reading! Well argued though I do not agree.) August 11 at 9:40pm

Noah Simblist Hi all - to answer Deborah's question, I think that calling social justice, or social action work, art does accomplish one thing - it enters it into a discourse of representation and performativity that often is taken for granted outside of the art world. The real strength to me of artworks that engage the social or political is putting something on the table that is often impoverished - the ability to imagine another future, or even a methodology to get there. August 11 at 10:34pm

Noah Simblist And for the record - it is a fallacy to lump together all social practice works or socially engaged works together as anti-capitalist, or even political. Deborah and Tom, you were both at the last Open Engagement (an annual conference on Socially Engaged Art -Ed.), a supposed gathering of social practice works and in my mind, very little was politicized at all! One problem in the rhetoric that surrounds much of this work is the resistance to true criticality.

Deborah Fisher Hi Nato, I agree that assessment is difficult. But in order to respect these projects' place in everyday life, and their stated or implicit social goals, and to move the dialogue forward, I feel that assessing SEA is really necessary. My sense is that this will be a more qualitative than quantitative project. The language we are using at ABOG is "case studies." We are thinking primarily in terms of asking various stakeholders about their experiences and asking artists to self-assess.

This is very different than producing "proof" as you say. But I do think that we will find in these case studies a clearer set of arguments for, and stories about the poetic/symbolic importance of this work in communities. August 12 at 7:44am

Deborah Fisher Noah, I agree with your sentiment about a resistance to true criticality, and about the apolitical nature of much of the work at OE standing in stark contrast to the political rhetoric at OE.

I think Davis is sidestepping the poetic and symbolic worth of PRH (Project Row Houses -Ed.). But I also think that he's pointing to an interesting set of real limitations and pitfalls. August 12 at 8:05am

Nato Thompson I am back. I am not saying that assessing SAE isn't important. I just think that we have a long way to go before that is even possible. First we must formulate a more productive language and critical frameworks in thinking through these projects. For me, Davis has a faulty framework for thinking through this. His argument is a tautology in that it sets up the conditions for its own failure. His framework for thinking through aesthetics and politics, like Tom demonstrates, produces its own set of impossibilities that have nothing to do with SAE but instead are about the limitations of his own analysis. If one can't point toward anything that solves the concerns one is raising, then one suffers from something bigger than just a loss of faith in art. I think that we need to broaden the terms to think through a world where the tools of art have been incorporated into everyday life. This still allows us to think through efficacy, but the language is not exactly that well formed (this conversation as an example). Finding a way to talk about efficacy will be difficult before we know what the playing field is, and the terms are. August 14 at 9:41am

Deborah Fisher Welcome back!

I'm suspicious of this idea that we have no language or framework to assess something that we already do, produce, hold conferences and write books about, and directly experience. SEA is not particularly new, and assessment is nothing more than evaluating the nature or quality of something. My sense is that we have a lot of handholds for figuring this out.

It worries me to think that SEA-a form of cultural production that is created in cooperation with communities that have better things to do than read theory-would need a whole new language and framework in order to be evaluated. How do we include these participants in assessing and valuing this work if we have to talk about it in a highly specialized way that we experts cannot even imagine yet?

I agree completely that our sense of how we talk about art needs to expand into life. But I think that we have some existing tools for this kind of work, that are as old as we are. I've had very productive, if strange, conversations with non-major art appreciation students about Allan Kaprow's ideas about un-arting oneself, for example.

I'm curious about your sense that evaluation requires this externally applied framework-a defined playing field that externally defines efficacy across projects. Do you think this would ever be possible? It's not something we have any interest in creating at ABOG HQ. We are thinking about building a set of case studies, and defining efficacy first in terms of the artists' goals. This is more aligned with how we evaluate the quality of other types of art, and there are great models in the social sciences that we can bring in without displacing aesthetics.

Can we refine the tools we have? Sure. I'm a reformer, to use Tom Finkelpearl's revolution-or-reform framework, so I think we refine and build by using what we have at hand. I see a rich set of resources to build with, some of which are authored by you!

I agree with you that Davis' article is about problems rather than solutions. Why isn't waiting for a language revolution before we even start evaluating SEA similar problematizing? August 14 at 11:30am

Elizabeth Grady As someone who has worked on carefully assessed SEA projects (under the aegis of the smARTpower program of the Bronx Museum, where we sent 15 artists abroad to 15 countries to engage in such projects), and likewise designing an even more comprehensive assessment program for ABOG, I would beg to differ with Nato on this one. In fact, there is a rich literature on assessment that takes into account qualitative and quantitative approaches. It includes things like Collaborative Action Research, Participatory Action Research, the methodology endorsed and described most eloquently on the Animating Democracy website, in addition to ethnographic and sociological approaches long in use (see for example Dwight Conquergood). These approaches, when taken together, encompass self-evaluation and evaluation by outside professionals. They consider the aesthetic as well as social impacts. This does not, of course, mean that it is always possible to assess such work; assessment is an expensive proposition, but IMHO one of the reasons that so much of the literature (or at least public discourse in the form of panel discussions, et al) on SEA can sound so insular and tautological lies precisely in the fact that stakeholder voices outside the artists and institutions that support them are so often left out of the conversation. August 15 at 1:11pm
TOM FINKELPEARL'S FACEBOOK PAGE
Hey everyone - here is an article that is well worth reading, though as you might guess, I disagree! Of course, I am one of the people trumpeting Project Row Houses as a great work of public/social/cooperative art. There are some excellent comments about the article on the Facebook page of Deborah Fisher, including Nato Thompson weighing in... Take a look there. August 11 at 9:45pm

Tom Finkelpearl There are trade-offs in all aspects of life, so engagement comes with compromise much of the time. The question is how profound is the compromise... August 11 at 10:35pm

Deborah Fisher Hey Tom, thanks for spreading this around!

I think this article provides an important perspective because it admits that calling these social projects "art" brings power, but not in a way that solves the problem. For Davis, this is the end of the argument, and well, for me it's the beginning of the argument. But either way, if the work is going to have the political impact it's intended to have, the discourse around it has to own its relationship to power. August 12 at 6:49am
RICK LOWE'S FACEBOOK PAGE
While this is an interesting article, and Ben Davis should be applauded for writing it, the comments by Deborah Fisher, Nato Thompson, and Tom Finkelpearl are enlightening responses. Undoubtedly this article will add context to the conversation Nato and I will be having as a part of the next Creative Time Summit in October. August 11 at 10:11pm

Tom Finkelpearl Yes Rick Lowe, but I really want to talk to the guy who wrote this! What does he suggest we do? Should we retire from any sort of institutional setting? These are not rhetorical questions. I would truly like to hear what he thinks an artist or museum director with a social vision should be producing. August 11 at 10:18pm

Rick Lowe Tom Finkelpearl I don't know Ben Davis. Maybe Nato Thompson should invite him to the conversation at the Creative Time Summit. It would be interesting to be in dialogue with him. He brings an interesting perspective and critique that I respect. August 11 at 10:22pm

Katy Reckdahl At the outset, the piece seems to dismiss Project Row Houses because its unit count is dwarfed by Houston's Section 8 list. I, too, think that Mr. Davis brought admirable depth and history to his piece but I kept waiting for him to discuss "social practice" as a natural outcropping of art's long history as a social critique. After Hurricane Katrina, we saw the force of art first-hand as one voice consistently demanding that New Orleans be rebuilt. August 11 at 11:03pm

Katy Reckdahl I think my biggest critique is that I'm not convinced that Mr. Davis has experienced art's power to change. So he spends his piece wringing his hands that art hasn't done enough and then tries to end on a "hopeful" note with his coda about a handful of people who left a meeting to march in a protest. Maybe I'm misled, but in the world where social issues meet art, isn't there so much more to be hopeful about? August 11 at 11:42pm

Rick Lowe Katy Reckdahl I agree that Ben Davis underestimates the role of the symbolic and poetic power of art. But this has challenged many, since artists have tried to find new meaning for their work in the context of economic, political, and social crisis. Take gentrification for example, artists are seeking to move away from being the problem of gentrification to exploring ways to contribute to solving the problems of gentrification. Yet when I make statements like the one I just made, I realize I'm contributing to a problem for artists by using the word "solving." Over the years I have learned to be careful about using the word "solving" and always try to temper it with words like "exploring" and "contributing" to lessen expectations that are artists have the power or responsibility to "solve" problems.

Project Row Houses and our housing program have never been about "solving" the housing problem for Houston. We thought that by contextualizing housing as an artistic exploration, we could symbolically show the value of developing housing that embraced the existing people and history of the community. I agree with Ben Davis, Project Row Houses has not solved Houston's housing problem. But the symbolic quality of the project has generated dialogue within our community and others about the value of existing community context when developing.

The expectation that artists and arts organizations "solve" problems goes way beyond Ben Davis. "Placemaking" is the current word being used to identify artists and arts organizations working in social/community contexts. The main indicator being used to determine the "placemaking" value of the work is "outcome", or solution to some problem. In general this is very problematic for me as an artist, but more specifically as an artist who works within the context of community development. In our hyper-capitalist society, the value outcome most often sought is economic. When Project Row Houses entered the world of real estate, our interest was to contextualize the social in an aesthetic way. We later realized its political role. But from an artistic standpoint the economics of real estate was and still is the least interesting part. However, now in the era of "placemaking", economics has made its way to the top of the list of concerns. I find this very problematic for the continued growth of the field of creative social/community engaged work. August 12 at 1:23am

Deborah Fisher Hi Rick, nice to meet you! The thing I value about this article is the relationship Davis is drawing between art and power and the social agenda of SEA projects. Funders of this work need to be able to address this criticism of it without collapsing into instrumentalizing art, or making an essentialist claim that art is simply good because it's good.

I don't think it's your responsibility to be accountable to a drop in section 8 housing claims in Houston, obviously, and I agree with other commenters that Davis is minimizing the symbolic role of art, the power of art to inspire, the need for a poetics of social change.

But as a funder who believes in these things, what does it mean that I fund projects that do not solve social problems? What exactly am I accountable to when I do this? What are the metrics of these social poetics?

I don't think it's possible to get to clear, practical, accountable language about what SEA can and cannot do without owning the privilege of it all. August 12 at 7:21am

Katy Reckdahl Deborah Fisher: I appreciate your questions, too, about describing the value of SEA projects without falling prey to simplistic metrics. And Rick: I hear you about the larger debate, even if I quibble about how it was presented. In journalism, as you know, clicks and awards dominate. In some ways, this economic-based debate has value - news outlets now seem to care much more about what readers want - but it has overwhelmed more artistic discussions about story, narrative and explanation of complex issues in the same way that "placemaking" has dwarfed discussions about social fabric and what gives life to a community. August 12 at 9:38am

Glenn Weiss Just a classic socialist critique that small positive interventions give the impression that capitalism can solve its negative attributes by the free actions of good people. These inventions distract other people from fighting the capitalist structure. Unfortunately, we are many, many years from a people's revolt against the power of the international corporations. ........ The better critique of social practice is its current super-minority status in all its worlds - arts, politics and social services. How does it move to a stable minority role? Where has it moved to a stable minority today? How stable are Project Row Houses, SPARK and Philly Murals? Have the values of "human dignity through the arts" been truly established in Houston, LA and Philly such that this minority idea retains a civic presence without the institution? August 12 at 10:57am

Tom Finkelpearl To get back to what Rick Lowe said above -way back in the day when he was working on the Homeless Vehicle, Krzysztof Wodiczko told me that he considered himself a "critical real estate artist." I would call Rick an "activist real estate artist," but his does not mean that either of them fails to traffic in the symbolic or emblematic. And Glenn Weiss - could you explain more what you mean by super-minority status? And to Deborah Fisher and Katy Reckdahl - how can assessment and complexity coexist? Isn't that what the field of aesthetics was born to consider? I mean shouldn't the discussion/evaluation of Social Art be a branch of aesthetics rather than an extension of sociology? I think that this would be healthy for (social) aesthetics as well as for social theory. Just a thought. August 12 at 11:31am

Deborah Fisher Tom, first, I think social art should be a branch of aesthetics that leans heavily on the existing knowledge and methods of sociology. August 12 at 11:39am

Deborah Fisher Second, Tom, to assess something is simply to evaluate its nature or qualities in a meaningful way. Is there no such thing as an aesthetic assessment? August 12 at 11:40am

Tom Finkelpearl Yes, Deborah Fisher, agreed. Aesthetics is all about assessment - finding meaningful ways to talk about art. So how can aesthetics be bent toward the social without simply becoming sociology or political science? August 12 at 11:43am

Rick Lowe Deborah Fisher In my work, I'm concerned with both the symbolic (aesthetic) and the practical (outcome) and don't have a problem explaining to housing funders the outcome of our housing work, i.e., economic impact. I just don't think that art funders should have the same assessment criteria as housing funders. Is there an assessment model that can honor the full range of artistic contribution without neglecting the outcomes that are expected in political and sociological terms? August 12 at 12:14pm

Deborah Fisher Rick, the short answer is... we're working on it! August 12 at 12:26pm

Katy Reckdahl I look forward to hearing more about this topic. It seems to me that, like art, sociological success is often in the eye of the beholder. August 12 at 1:10pm · Like

Elizabeth Grady The longer answer, to tag onto what Deb is saying, is to say that there are a range of strategies for addressing community impact, aesthetic value, and metrics of the sort that housing funders and others outside the artsphere need to see in order to feel comfortable sharing their resources to promote change. A multifaceted approach that allows for the voices (and often conflicting perceptions) of multiple stakeholders (artists, community leaders, partner organizations,...) to be heard, with parallel statistics about participation and community makeup is a good start. This combines theories of change with ethnographic methods of evaluation and dialogic approaches like collaborative action research, participatory action research. A well-rounded qualitative and quantitative model is called for, I believe. August 12 at 1:30pm

Glenn Weiss When you switch toward people as your art, then outsiders cannot possibly know the aesthetic success. All knowledge of the artwork is either a documentary, a tourist tour, word of mouth myth or as Brett Cook calls it, the leftover "debris" or stuff made. The thoughts and motivation caused by the documentary, tour, myth or debris can be critiqued. The actual artwork is a private event. And yet we can be thrilled and motivated by the documentation or debris. ....... As to Tom Finkelpearl 's questions, What is a super-minority, I guess that was not the best use of "super." A better phrase might be mini-minority. Social Practice or Community Art or DIY or ?? needs to find a home: a solid minority action in some field of knowledge. But more important to me is the solidity of recognition with particular communities that are seeking to preserve or create a dense quality of life. August 12 at 6:26pm

Gregory Sholette What is intrinsically radical, anti-capitalist, and red all over? A Barnett Newman perhaps? Not really. One of Malevich's squares, correct? A bit closer, then? What about the re-staging of the storming of the Winter Palace in 1918? I'm getting hotter, yes?

Ben Davis writes: "You cannot prevent innovations in art from eventually being given a capitalist articulation."

And we are confronted with a conundrum. Does culture (in this case the visual or fine arts)- ever act to directly shape socio-economic reality, or is it in turn always molded by these forces? And if capitalism is the totality of our existence, then how can any artistic practice be substantially "anti-capitalist" or "radical" or "subversive" and therefore let us call it "pro-human" or "pro-society"?

Much like the perennial debates over "form v. content," or the more recent "is it art or is it activism?" there can be no satisfactory answer to the conundrum of whether or not radical innovation -however defined- is or is not complicit with capital's long march, or to be more specific, the market's attempted sublation of all forms of human production (including more and more the very gristle and bone of human and animal life itself). And this is not the case because such debates touch on mysterious or metaphysical depths of aesthetic or ontological reality, but rather because, as Mr. Davis certainly knows, interpretation and judgment are always subject to the same socio-economic and historical forces that shape culture at any given moment. This is where Marx left Kant in antiquity's dust. "We know only a single science, the science of history," insisted Marx and Engels countering the vagaries of German idealist philosophy. So yes, agreed, innovations in art may indeed be useful to, or even foretell of future market trends (though again, I am not certain how this can be read except in retrospect), and their relative speed or ease of subsumption possibly even marking the very tempo of capital's entrepreneurial drive, but by the same dialectic they might, circumstances permitting, undermine or resist these forces, offering at the very least a momentary breach within the decadence of what Mr. Davis labels commercial art, an indignation if not exact wording I share. However, in the best of moments such practices cast a light, however weak, on an often less-visible counter-historical tendency entwined with capitalist development itself, a tendency that, while no less "historical" in Marx and Engel's terms (as opposed to Hegel's metaphysical "geist"), acts as a negative though material drag on market momentum. This "art history from below" is akin to what the Marxist theorists Kluge and Negt describe as a counter public sphere: a realm of fragmented publics and working class fantasy generated in response to the alienating conditions of capitalism. Occupy and the Movement of the Squares undoubtedly brought this other cultural force, this missing mass or creative dark matter, into the fore, and for better in most cases I would say, although also for worse in some instances. This historical situation that while less dynamic at this moment is still in development may even be what spurred certain trends such as "relational aesthetics" to turn a tad more "militant"? In any case, pointing out this evolution is spot on, Mr. Davis. Meanwhile, it seems these days revolutions are labeled as soon as they emerge, in life and in art, and while curiously few have described social practice art specifically as "avant garde" the fact that art and politics are even being debated with such fervor is in itself a sign of hope. Again, this is the particular strength of Mr. Davis's critique even if his use of theory and the specific details he musters for his arguments are at times subject to question. Ultimately, I am reminded of Walter Benjamin's anecdote that revolution is not so much the train hurtling down the tracks but the pull on the emergency brake by the working class. Here's to that pull. Let's make it a good one next time. August 17 at 12:11pm

Tom Finkelpearl I am not so interested in hearing about how certain practices are compromised. Certainly all practices are to some degree. Problematizing can be tiresome! What is it that people think we should be doing? What is the least compromised route? I have seen firsthand what is up at Project Row Houses on a number of occasions, and it is a work of social art that I would like to put forward as exemplary. Not perfect. Not without compromises, but constructive and self-critical and constantly evolving in creative social-aesthetic directions. So people, what is your alternative? August 19 at 6:42pm

Nato Thompson Frankly, I don't like reacting to the Davis article. I just can't beat the drum of Adorno/Brecht anymore. That is what makes me reluctant to participate in this. That said, I would like to know what folks would prefer to discuss.... for me the better way to articulate the differences around SAE is to place the questions of what they do in a different light. How do places of inter-subjective play and radical pedagogy produce different forms of collective behavior? How is the media used as a form that resists dominant conditions of power? What kinds of infrastructure can make social forms of play and politics? How can we produce spaces where autonomous action is actually possible? What type of city can we build using a hybrid of radical pedagogy and democratized play with the built environment? How can we produce spaces and situations that up-end ideas of race and class in a way that is fun, strange and liberating? We can use a myriad of examples that move across disciplines from architecture to contemporary ecology, to city planning, to pedagogy, to radical politics, and in those interstitial spaces between we find more amazing questions and nuance. August 20 at 4:25am

Tom Finkelpearl Nato - I really like these questions. They are the right questions to ask - and I would submit that there are a slew of artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Bruguera Tania, and Rick Lowe who put these sorts of issues into form every day. But I do like the discussion that has emerged from the Davis article because there are other unanswered questions related to compromise and co-optation that need to be considered seriously.... August 20 at 10:25pm

Rick Lowe Nato Thompson, I agree with Tom Finkelpearl that you post good questions to consider and I think many of us ponder these questions continually in our work. Like Tom, even though I might not agree with the way Ben Davis frames his critique, I find the questions he brings up important to consider. One of the biggest concerns I have for the field of social and community engaged practice is that we don't have serious critical dialogue about the work being practiced and produced. And I'm not talking about dialogue that questions whether socially engaged work is art. I'm talking about dialogue about how our work relates to the issues of power, privilege, appropriations, exploitations, etc. I self-reflect on these issues daily in relation to my work, but it is valuable to confront them from different perspectives with different agendas. I'm excited to hear Ben Davis's perspectives, and eager to learn more of his perspectives on art that rise above "capitalist articulation", and the "completely different direction" that social practice might take as a result of critical debating. August 21 at 1:33am

Deborah Fisher What I find so valuable about your questions, Nato, is the way they account for art's ability to expand the boundaries of what is real and possible. This is hard for us to talk about-it's easier to either essentialize this art and say its good because it's good, or instrumentalize it and make claims about its effectiveness that don't hold up to scrutiny.

To continue Rick's thoughts... My sense is that that a sustained, rigorous, accessible critical dialogue is key if we want to actually achieve the vision you're laying out. This type of work relies on collaborators that are outside the contemporary art dialogue, and efficacy and ethics are big aspects of its aesthetic. We need to be able to talk about it in ways that empower artists/makers and include prospective collaborators and participants.

This critical dialogue must preserve the vastness and possibility you're bringing to the table-I am totally over post-structuralism's obsession with what's impossible. I also think it's important to think through what this work is and is not; what it can and cannot do; how it relates to existing power dynamics and social change mechanisms. August 21 at 7:47am

Nato Thompson Sure and I guess I should be glad to have this good conversation with y'all. Yes, there definitely needs to be much more conversation on methodologies and kinds of practice. There is so much amazing, complicated work being done that perhaps specific examples are worth digging into. What I would like to hear more about is, for example: what has Teddy Cruz learned by working at the city of San Diego? What can Damon Rich tell us about the pragmatic functions of governmentality mixed with radical pedagogy in the city of Newark, NJ? How is ToroLab's FarmLab actually going to function in the heart of Tijuana? What are the social and infrastructural networks that are being produced in the wake of the Gezi Park protests? What can we learn from the methodologies of DeColonizing Architecture in thinking through spatial/cultural solutions to intractable political problems? August 21 at 8:53am
We want to hear your thoughts! Join the conversation in the Comments section! Read more from Growing Dialogue: What is the Effectiveness of Socially Engaged Art? "Ben Davis Responds" by Ben Davis - September 18, 2013 "Spaces of Possibility" by Nato Thompson - September 23, 2013 "#DoWeHaveThis?" by Tom Finkelpearl - September 24, 2013 "Working Towards Justice" by Rick Lowe - September 24, 2013 "On Bullshit" by Deborah Fisher - September 26, 2013 "Round 2: The Ontological Question" by Ben Davis - October 21, 2013 "The Ethically Neutral Dilemma of SEA" by Nato Thompson - October 23, 2013 "A Belated Conclusion" by Ben Davis - November 26, 2013 "The Name Game" by Louisa McCall - January 11, 2014
"What is the Effectiveness of Socially Engaged Art?" - September 18, 2013

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What is the Effectiveness of Socially Engaged Art? - A Blade of Grass

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On August 9, 2013 Deborah Fisher, Executive Director of A Blade of Grass posted a link to Ben Davis's article, "A Critique of Social Practice Art: What does it mean to be a political artist?" which appeared in issue #90 of the International Socialist Review on her Facebook page.

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"... a moment when an idea or a need temporarily occupies the primary function of space. A kitchen table that serves the primary function of being a table, at which people sit to eat, is spontaneously transformed, through child’s play, into a pirate ship sailing hostile waters. For a while (maybe a pirate’s lifetime) this table is occupied entirely by its purpose as a ship, when play concludes it returns to its basic table form. But for those who encountered the table in its pirate ship form, it will never be the same again. Something has changed, a potential has been discovered, a feeling experienced, a possibility revealed. "ARTANGEL WEB-SITE

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"...the community should be at the table when solving problems that directly affect them..."

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Civic Practice

Some artists further distinguish the SEA field to include an art practice that is more embedded in civic institutions. Termed civic practice, this is defined as "arts-based partnership work that is developed in service to the needs of a partner organization or agency that does not have an arts-centered mission" (The Center for Performance and Civic Practice). Rather than leading with a preconveived vision, an "artist employs the assets of his/her [/their] craft in response to the needs of non-arts partners as determined through ongoing relationship-based dialogue. The impulse of what to make comes out of the relationship, not an artist-driven proposal." (Rohd, 2012) As such, artists operating the civic context:

1. Respond artistically to the needs of their non-arts partners through ongoing collaboration;

2. Integrate artistic practice into civic institutions where art has not traditionally been used, and

3. Frame artistic responses as responding to strategic needs.

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Some artists further distinguish the SEA field to include an art practice that is more embedded in civic institutions. Termed civic practice, this is defined as "arts-based partnership work that is developed in service to the needs of a partner organization or agency that does not have an arts-centered mission" (The Center for Performance and Civic Practice).

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‘Are we not allowed to talk about this? Estate Agency and the Portland Inn Project are really important because I genuinely believe in people-led change. As artists we talk a lot about working with people. We don’t discriminate between a baker and a developer. I believe you need to be round a table with all the stakeholders in order to affect change.’

Rebecca Davies

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'What are our motives? How do we make sure this isn't just about us as artists and what we want? When am I being a neighbour and when am I being an artist?'
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Anna Francis

Selling the post-industrial city

Stoke-on-Trent is a federation of six English towns that grew up in the 19th century on mining, steel and, above all, a ceramics industry of famous names like Wedgwood, Minton and Spode. It became a city in 1925; a generation later it had 276,000 inhabitants. Since then, however, Stoke has fought a losing battle against deindustrialisation. Its collieries and steelworks have closed, to be followed by the great potteries that made its reputation. The Spode Works shut in 2008 after 230 years of production. Some names survive as brands, but manufacture has mostly gone elsewhere. In 2001, the city's population had fallen by about 35,000 people.

In Stoke, as in other cities devastated by economic storms, local government faces a daunting task of clearing the remains of heavy industry and finding new sources of work and prosperity for its people. The usual public-private sector partnerships are working on the city's infrastructure and attractiveness, while promoting Stoke to outside investors, including online retailer Amazon. The creative industries are seen as part of this future and there is now a cultural quarter. The nine acre Spode site was bought by the Council and its redevelopment includes housing, a museum and 43 artists' studios. Arts Council England supports Appetite, a participatory arts programme that 'aims to get more people in Stoke-on-Trent to experience and be inspired by the arts.' With support from local cultural organisations, universities, media and businesses, Stoke City Council bid to be the UK's next City of Culture in 2021. Though it lost to Coventry, the experience was energising.

On the margins of these grand plans are the many small communities that make up a city and where any improvement in people's lives will - or will not - be felt. Stoke has a lot of run-down Victorian buildings. Many factories, shops and homes stand empty, without buyers. In 2013, the Council decided to sell some of these properties with generous incentives to new residents in the hope of strengthening one fragile neighbourhood. They offered 33 houses in Cobridge at a nominal price of £1, which naturally attracted publicity and some controversy. In fact, because buyers had to take on a share of the renovation cost, the final price of the houses was about £30,000. Still, it was cheap for a two or three bedroom house, even here, and it came with conditions. The first was an earnings threshold designed to help low-income families. Secondly, the buyer had to live in the house for at least five years and could not sell it for ten. And, the sale agreement also stipulated that they must be active in the community, though what that meant was open to interpretation. Within a year, all the available houses were sold and occupied. Among the neighbourhood's new residents was an artist, Anna Francis, and her young family.

Anna Francis and AirSpace

Anna Francis had studied at Staffordshire University in Stoke and returned to teach there after time abroad. She is also a member of AirSpace, a gallery and studio group set up in 2006 to support artists who wanted to stay in Stoke. In 2007, the Council offered AirSpace a disused Victorian building in the city centre, where they made nine studios, meeting rooms and a street-front gallery. AirSpace sees itself as an active partner in the city's post-industrial renewal, keen to support but also to question local initiatives. Alongside their own practice, AirSpace artists have put on workshops, exhibitions and public events. They have also developed pilot environmental projects, including the Spode Rose Garden, on the historic site which is also home to the British Ceramics Biennial. Established in 2009, the Biennial has become a regular partner in AirSpace projects, including Anna's work in her new home near Portland Street.

The neighbourhood is a few minutes' walk from the city centre, but it feels much further away. Its terraced houses were cheaply built and there has been little money to improve or even maintain them since.

Most are rented, some unoccupied. Unemployment here is twice the national average, while key health, education and crime statistics underline the multiple difficulties faced by residents. Anna was aware of mistrust among her neighbours about regeneration initiatives. There had been too many consultations and too many broken promises over the years. In planning an art project, she faced practical difficulties, notably the lack of a community space in which to work, and human ones, including hostility from people who did not want attention drawn to illegal activities. And there were difficulties unique to the situation. The fact that she and others had moved into the area with Council support caused understandable resentment among some residents who had not received such help. All in all, this was stony ground.

Artist and neighbour

'Community Maker', as Anna Francis called her first project, began quietly, with clay workshops over eight days in July and August 2015. She pitched a tent on a patch of green space beside a boarded-up pub, and invited people to work on a clay map of the area, highlighting their hopes and difficulties. Although she made connections with the ceramic industry's use of flowers and their symbolism, the activity was mainly an opportunity for people to meet and talk as they worked the clay. Conversations grew over tea and cake, and the lack of any community space for local activities was a recurring complaint.
'While we were cleaning, someone started hammering at the door and yelling that she was going to make trouble for us. We were thinking 'Where is our support?', because actually we're quite exposed, in this precarious position. How can we deal with this? Because we want this to be a place for everyone, and that includes the people who are yelling at us.'
That summer, Anna met Rebecca Davies, another socially engaged artist who had been invited to do a project in Stoke by Appetite. Davies is from London and much of her work has explored the tensions arising from redevelopment schemes in the capital. With their shared concern about the place of the artist in social contexts and interest in urban renewal, Anna and Rebecca quickly became friends. They agreed to work together on the next stage of 'Community Maker': the opening of a temporary community arts centre over the summer of 2016.

Anna Francis

The obvious venue was the Portland Inn, which had stood empty for years but was remembered by local residents as a friendly community hub. The City Council, which now owns it, allowed the artists to take it over temporarily, and even did some repairs to make the building safe. After cleaning and work to make it a pleasant space for activities, Anna and Rebecca opened The Portland Inn Project on 8 August 2016. Over the next four weeks, they hosted 600 visitors in 54 different activities, including dance workshops, bingo evenings, cake making, pottery workshops and much more. A photo studio was installed in which people made self-portraits showing themselves enjoying the kind of activities that they wanted to see in the Portland Inn if it could become a permanent community and arts space. And around all these activities, discussions continued about how to make this possible.
'The Minion ended up being quite a symbol. It was an important moment in making us ask how much say we had in how this looks and what happens. We suddenly realised that we hadn't thought about who has ownership and how much space there is for other people. We both hated the Minion because it was out of place in the programme we put on, but it stayed in the space nonetheless.'
The success of the temporary occupation and a solid business plan have convinced the Council that the building could be given to the community as a local asset. In May 2017, the Portland Inn Project was registered as a Community Interest Company, and the process of acquiring the pub and the resources to renovate and run it began. But the artists recognise that the road ahead will be challenging, not just in organisational terms but in artistic and human ones too. There was a key moment early in the developing relationship between the artists and the community. One of the people who'd been most active in the getting the pub ready for its reopening brought a large cardboard character from an animated film. She wanted it there for the children, but it was not in keeping with the artists' ideas of the Portland Inn.

Anna Francis

The Minion was one instance of a difference of meaning between the artists and the people they were inviting to be part of the project. There will be many more, perhaps rooted in questions of power rather than aesthetics or art, and some of them will be much more difficult to resolve. It is the artists who understand that such negotiations are not a zero-sum game who co-create the most valuable work. They see that ceding part of their artistic autonomy can be a route to the emergence of new, richer work than anyone could have imagined, still less achieved, on their own.

The complexities of social action

It is easy to see how selling discounted houses to outsiders in exchange for community engagement could turn out badly. With a terrible shortage of homes in parts of England, housing development is often contested and politicised. The place of artists in urban renewal has also become contested and politicised because, in their search for cheap places to live and work, they often gravitate to low-rent, neglected districts. The association between artists and gentrification (the transformation of rundown districts for and by wealthier residents) has been debated since the 1980s. Some see artists and creative industries as pioneers of urban regeneration.For others they are dupes or collaborators of speculators whose profits depend on marginalising the poor. But an association is not a cause. Perhaps artists are neither as important nor as culpable in a property development economy driven by far more powerful and remote forces.

Things are not necessarily linked because they occur simultaneously. Since the 1980s, industrial cities have faced huge economic and social development leading to dereliction and - less often - renewal in their physical environments. Since the 1980s, the economic and social importance of culture has also grown immensely, leading to far more artists and creative workers than in the past. The excess of supply over demand in the creative economy keeps most artists rather poor, so they live and work where it's cheap. Those places tend also to be prime sites for development, especially where, as in south-east England, the real estate economy has an excess of demand over supply. But it does not follow that artists either attract or enable development: they may just be there.

Still, the accusation that artists can be complicit in the development process must be taken seriously. Developers and local authorities are increasingly interested in using the arts, especially perhaps where social housing is involved. Since the Conservative government introduced 'right to buy' in 1979, the stock of public housing for rent has fallen by 1.6 million. What remains is refurbished to meet modern standards but also to improve the appearance of surrounding areas, Mixed motives and divided management do not foster confidence among tenants so redevelopment schemes are often accompanied by artists' commissions for work on consultation, oral history, documentation and similar themes. Such initiatives are now commonplace in British cities, often supported by a publicly-funded cultural sector anxious to demonstrate its wider relevance.

Does this kind of socially-engaged art lend a human face to brutal processes in which people who have lived somewhere for decades are relocated for a supposedly greater purpose? Perhaps. Does it affect whether or even how the redevelopment will happen? I doubt it. Urban development is driven by politics, economics and social demographics, not art. Its failures and injustices must be taken on where they can actually be changed - and that is not the education suites of public art galleries. If art does have a critical function in social life it might have something of value to offer people whose lives are affected by remote decisions they cannot influence. It might be able to express and make visible other experiences. It might even be able to create symbols and rituals of resistance.

But even in trying to do such things, artists risk being compromised and exploited by greater forces. The troublesome tensions between art and power are not new. How many great artists of the past approved of the princes who paid their wages and whose cultural authority they enhanced?

Even asking such questions is a privilege of sorts. Human beings are interdependent. Their actions, personal, social, economic and political, involve compromise with others. Artists who work with others, whether as participants or partners, relinquish some autonomy in exchange for increased capacities. The nature and degree of the compromises they make are matters of judgement and the only way of navigating these hazardous waters is to apply your critical faculties to your own work as much as to the social world in which it takes place.

'Estate Agency'
'Estate Agency was asking if there are more artists in a place, is that a good thing? But then is there a point where there are too many of us, when we start to occupy and colonise and change. Is there a tipping point when suddenly what was good about us becomes damaging to the place and its people?'
The Campbell Works gallery is in Stoke Newington, a part of northeast London that was once considered poor but has been steadily gentrifying for 30 years. The average house price here is about £670,000: in Stoke-on-Trent it is £140,000. The gallery was boarded up on 8 April 2017 and remained closed for three weeks before reopening as an estate agency. The new business was staffed by four young women, smartly dressed in the company colours of tan, custard and blue. (The two other estate agents were also from Stoke-on-Trent: Nicola Winstanley, an artist with a socially engaged practice, and Penny Vincent a lecturer at Staffordshire University and specialist in volunteering, active citizenship, community engagement and participation.) They offered visitors details of houses and workspace for sale in Stoke-on-Trent, under the slogan 'Your life, but better'. Over the following week, a series of promotional events were held including a 'conveyancing focus lunch' and family day with a 'Handbook for Intended Settlers'.

Anna Francis
What responsibility do artists and arts organisations have in this process? Are artists complicit in the developers plans, or are we as much of a victim as the communities that are being forced out? How can we use our collective creative agency to do things differently? As art organisations see the neighbourhoods around them change, do we need to change the way we work to reflect those changes? Estate Agency
Anna Francis is originally from Margate and has seen the transformation of the town by the presence of artists who, priced out of London, are attracted by the magnet that is Turner Contemporary. Rebecca Davies grew up in the Elephant and Castle district of south London, where massive and controversial redevelopment is making locals fear they will be excluded from their own community: she moved to Stoke-on-Trent partly because of these pressures. 'Estate Agency' set out to raise some difficult questions about the place of artists in culture-led regeneration:
'Are we not allowed to talk about this? Estate Agency and the Portland Inn Project are really important because I genuinely believe in people-led change. As artists we talk a lot about working with people. We don't discriminate between a baker and a developer. I believe you need to be round a table with all the stakeholders in order to affect change.'
The irony with which 'Estate Agency' gave form to these tensions was not appreciated by everyone and the project attracted some harsh online criticism. It was a bruising experience, but for Anna Francis and Rebecca Davies, it is the sensitivity of these issues and their relevance for socially-engaged artists that make it imperative to debate them.

Rebecca Davies

Changing the world

Deindustrialisation is changing Stoke-on-Trent in profound and complex ways. How art and cultural development will influence that change remains to be seen, but Appetite, the British Ceramics Biennial, AirSpace, Restoke and other local organisations are bringing new opportunities and ideas to the city. So are individual artists, including Anna Francis and Rebecca Davies in their commitment to the community around Portland Street. Their work is valued by their neighbours, and from it may come a permanent new home for creative, educational and social activities. But the questions they are asking might be even more important. Other agencies could take on the Portland Inn and turn it into a community centre, but who else would raise their questions about the city, its culture and its people?

Even when artists' work is not immediately approachable to others, it has the capacity to surprise and disrupt. In creating a Spode China Rose as a ceramic object and a living plant, AirSpace also made a symbol of how the old factory site might be renewed. In creating a performance with people who have migrated here in the derelict Wedgwood Institute, Restoke showed that new inhabitants can be a chance for learning rather than a threat. In working with a real estate agency to question attitudes to property, community and social engagement Anna Francis and Rebecca Davies are helping artists to think more critically about their actions. These initiatives are very different from one another, but they all have a depth that means they stay in the mind. Where others might preach, they accept the complexities of people's experiences and feelings. They do not tell people what to think, only that these things are worth thinking about.

Underlying the different ethical dilemmas of The Portland Inn Project and Estate Agency is a larger question that concerns everyone involved in participatory art: what effect can I have? The scale of the issues artists engage with is often out of all proportion with their own resources and capacity. Cardboard Citizens and Streetwise Opera work only with homeless people; In Place of War supports art in conflict zones; 'Bed' and 'The Crystal Quilt' challenge prejudice about ageing women. What effect can an art project have on such major social issues?
With thanks to Anna Francis, Rebecca Davies, Glen Stoker, Nicola Winstanley and Clare Reynolds. Quotes taken from interviews; photographs © Anna Francis, Stephanie Rushton, Glen Stoker and François Matarasso
The answer, for people who continue with this kind of socially-engaged work, within and beyond the arts, lies somewhere between 'a little' and 'who knows'. It lies in believing that doing is better than not doing, that small change is better than no change; that speaking about wrong is better than remaining silent; that bearing witness can be a moral act, even, or especially, when no other is available. Most of all, perhaps, it is in believing that a critical, self-aware and questioning spirit is a foundation of better action, even if it is difficult to do and its consequences can be painful. That is the best available guarantee that the work we do in participatory art will do more good than harm. It is also an honourable place to stand.

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The complexities of socially-engaged art practice

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'What are our motives? How do we make sure this isn't just about us as artists and what we want? When am I being a neighbour and when am I being an artist?' Anna Francis Selling the post-industrial city Stoke-on-Trent is a federation of six English towns that grew up in the 19th century on...

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Various Journal Articles and Essays to be gone through...

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Various Journal Articles and Essays to be gone through...

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New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics

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New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics

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New Materialisms Ontology, Agency, and Politics

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Object-Oriented Ontology : A New Theory of Everything

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Object-Oriented Ontology : A New Theory of Everything

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Object-Oriented Ontology A New Theory of Everything

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The Agency of Objects: From Semper to the Bauhaus and Beyond

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The Agency of Objects: From Semper to the Bauhaus and Beyond

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The Agency of Objects: From Semper to the Bauhaus and Beyond.

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The Agency of Objects: From Semper to the Bauhaus and Beyond.

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Actor-network theory: new perspectives and contributions to consumption studies

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Actor-network theory: new perspectives and contributions to consumption studies

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"Analyzing the family’s efforts to maintain an inherited and important dining table in its history, Epp and Price (2010)emphasize the stability that materiality provides, the dynamics of meanings, and the agency of objects."

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Artigo

Teoria Ator-Rede: novas perspectivas e contribuições para os estudos de consumo

Teoría del actor-red: nuevas perspectivas y contribuciones a los estudios de consumo

Nota-se um crescimento do uso da Teoria do Ator-Rede (TAR) em várias subáreas da administração, como organizações, estratégia e marketing. No último campo, entretanto, o uso dessa abordagem ainda se concentra nos estudos internacionais. O presente trabalho tem por objetivo apresentar a TAR e como ela pode contribuir para o campo de pesquisa do consumo no Brasil, tendo em vista seu olhar singular para a relação entre os indivíduos e as coisas, suas interações e trajetórias. Visa, assim, a explorar o apanhado de temáticas e contribuições já alcançadas, a aplicação de métodos, bem como críticas e comparações ontológicas acerca do olhar sobre o social e atores envolvidos. Finalmente, discutem-se possibilidades para caminhos futuros abertos pela TAR, evidenciando como seus recursos podem rejuvenescer a pesquisa de marketing ao focar seu olhar nos aprendizados coletivos e mundanos, que superam conexões cognitivas, econômicas e culturais, a partir da ênfase nos aspectos da sociomaterialidade contida na cena de consumo e seu entorno. A partir da investigação exaustiva dos atores e de suas conexões diretas, a TAR descortina descobertas a respeito daquilo que é singular, mas também universal, nos estudos desenvolvidos por pesquisadores brasileiros.

Palavras-chave: Ontologia orientada ao objeto; Teoria Ator-Rede; TAR; Consumo

Se observa un aumento del uso de la teoría del actor-red (TAR) en diversas subáreas de la administración, como organizaciones, estrategia y marketing. En el último campo, no obstante, el uso de este enfoque aún se centra en los estudios internacionales. Este estudio tiene como objetivo presentar la TAR y cómo esta puede contribuir al campo de investigación del consumo en Brasil, dada su visión singular sobre la relación entre las personas y las cosas, sus interacciones y trayectorias. Así, se propone explorar el compendio de temáticas y contribuciones ya alcanzadas, la aplicación de métodos, así como las críticas y comparaciones ontológicas acerca de la visión de lo social y de los actores involucrados. Finalmente, se discuten las posibilidades de futuros caminos abiertos por la TAR, mostrando cómo sus recursos pueden rejuvenecer la investigación de marketing al enfocar los aprendizajes colectivos y mundanos, que superan conexiones cognitivas, económicas y culturales, partiendo del énfasis en los aspectos de la sociomaterialidad contenida en la escena del consumo y su entorno. A partir de la investigación exhaustiva de los actores y de sus conexiones directas, la TAR revela hallazgos no solo sobre lo que es singular, sino también universal en los estudios desarrollados por investigadores brasileños.

Palabras clave: Ontología orientada al objeto; Teoría del actor red; TAR; Consumo

There is an increase in the use of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in various fields of social sciences and most recently in marketing and consumption research. In marketing discipline, however, this approach has been incorporated more widely in international studies. This article argues for the applicability of ANT to the field of research consumption in Brazil. ANTs main contribution relates to its unique perspective in analyzing human-things relationships, interactions and trajectories. This article, therefore, aims to explore the existent themes and contributions, the methods of application, criticisms and comparisons with other ontology approaches facing the social and actors involved. Finally, the study discusses possibilities raised by ANT for future research, showing how its resources can rejuvenate marketing research with focus on the collective and worldly learning that exceeds cognitive, economic and cultural connections, and emphasizes socio-material aspects present in the consumer realm. Using thorough investigation of actors and their direct connections, ANT reveals findings about what is unique, but also universal in studies developed by Brazilian researchers.

Keywords: Object oriented ontology; Actor-Network Theory; ANT; Consumption

INTRODUÇÃO

Uma gama de estudos recentes na área de administração lança luz sobre a Teoria do Ator-Rede (TAR). Tendo sua origem no contexto dos estudos de ciência e tecnologia, essa abordagem tem sido adotada em várias subáreas, como organizações, estratégia e marketing. No Brasil, as potencialidades da TAR têm sido exploradas especialmente por pesquisadores organizacionais (CERRETO e DOMENICO, 2016; CAMILLIS e ANTONELLO, 2016; ANDRADE, 2004; CAVALCANTI e ALCADIPANI, 2013; AMÉRICO e TAKAHASHI, 2013; TONELLI, BRITO e ZAMBALDE, 2011; ALCADIPANI e TURETA, 2009; TURETA e ALCADIPANI, 2009; DONNELY, 2010; ANDRADE, CORDEIRO NETO e VALADÃO, 2013). No campo de marketing, entretanto, o uso dessa abordagem ainda se concentra nos estudos internacionais.

Um dos desafios na adoção da TAR reside não apenas na compreensão de seus conceitos e amplo repertório de termos, mas também no alinhamento do olhar do pesquisador para seu objeto de pesquisa que difere de outras formas já praticadas no campo. Assim, o presente trabalho tem por objetivo apresentar brevemente os pressupostos fundamentais dessa teoria complexa, seus vocabulários e métodos já empregados. Mais especificamente, busca-se, a partir da articulação e da releitura de estudos internacionais na área de consumo, refletir sobre suas contribuições para esse campo de pesquisa, tendo em vista seu olhar singular para a relação entre os indivíduos e as coisas, suas interações e trajetórias.

A TAR se configura a partir do trabalho de autores como Latour (1988; ), Callon (1986) e ), e se alinha às chamadas ontologias orientadas ao objeto, como Assemblage (DELEUZE e GUATTARI, 1987; DELANDA, 2006) e Entanglement (HODDER, 2012; ). Em comum, essas abordagens evitam as hierarquias tradicionais que privilegiam a agência humana, dando especial atenção às coisas. Compreender as contribuições da TAR aos estudos de consumo exige assim, em primeiro lugar, diferenciar formas de conceber a relação entre sujeitos e objetos dentro do campo de comportamento do consumidor, a partir das perspectivas da fenomenologia e da cultura material.

Tendo como base o pensamento de Heidegger (1971; ) e de Merleau-Ponty (1962; {1942}), a fenomenologia contempla a dualidade sujeito-objeto e lança seu olhar para as coisas a partir de sua relação com o sujeito. Seu interesse está em entender como essa relação ajuda a definir e serve aos projetos desenvolvidos pelos sujeitos. Dentro dessa abordagem, temos uma perspectiva antropocêntrica, na qual o indivíduo é ponto de partida para mapear e integrar tudo aquilo que está à sua volta (BORGERSON, 2005; HODDER, 2012).

Para a TAR, as coisas são mais do que ferramentas, pano de fundo ou palco em que atores sociais humanos desempenham os papéis principais. Em seus ensaios sobre antropologia simétrica, Latour (1994) propõe uma perspectiva que advoga o mesmo status e atenção para os atores humanos e não humanos. Os objetos têm agência, o que significa "estar associado de tal modo que fazem outros atores fazerem coisas" (LATOUR, 2012, p. 158). O humano não é vítima do processo, mas não se pode afirmar que seja um protagonista autônomo em ação. A TAR também pressupõe o rompimento com as dualidades sujeito-objeto. Para Latour (2012), por exemplo, um homem (sujeito) com uma arma (objeto) não é um sujeito com um objeto, mas um novo híbrido, uma nova entidade "homem-arma". É preciso ressaltar ainda que Latour (2012) rejeita o próprio conceito de ator como substância - algo que preexiste, está finalizado e perdura. Para o autor, atores são eventos, que, ao contrário das "substâncias", não podem ser diferenciados de suas manifestações e relações.

Na cultura material (MILLER, 2005), por sua vez, o foco da atenção não está na consciência ou percepção corporal do indivíduo, assim como acontece na fenomenologia, mas no ambiente exterior que o habitua e incita. O agente-chave que o torna característico de sua própria sociedade são as coisas, mediante processos de habituação com sua ordem. O sistema de coisas constitui as pessoas, e a circulação das coisas cria a sociedade e a cultura que a permeia. Na cultura material, a dualidade sujeito-objeto é mantida, e o ponto de interesse está na compreensão da relação dialética existente (BORGERSON, 2005; HODDER, 2012).

Latour (2012) entende que a ótica da cultura material enxerga a importância do objeto apenas para "refletir valores sociais" (LATOUR, 2012, p. 126), "esvaziando os apelos às relações de poder e às desigualdades sociais em algum significado real" (LATOUR, 2012, p. 127). A perspectiva latouriana (2005) não trata os objetos simplesmente como significado, mas como objetos cuja materialidade traz agência e características específicas que são tão relevantes quanto as simbólicas. Para a TAR, qualquer coisa que desempenhe um ato e modifique um status é considerada um ator. Os objetos não humanos fazem coisas, assim como os atores humanos, e transmitem efeitos em silêncio (BUTLER, 1872), desempenhando papéis e ajudando a rastrear conexões sociais. Nesse sentido, a TAR sugere a transcendência da oposição entre coisas e pessoas, chamando a atenção para o fato de que os objetos têm agência (; LATOUR, 1993; ), aspecto a ser aprofundado na próxima seção.

Tendo apresentado brevemente as diferenças fundamentais da TAR em relação às principais abordagens presentes no campo de consumo para analisar as relações sujeito-objeto, o próximo tópico apresenta as bases conceituais dessa teoria, discutindo-se em seguida suas implicações para os estudos de marketing. Nessa tarefa, são analisadas aplicações recentes da TAR nessa área, explorando temáticas utilizadas e métodos adotados. A terceira e última parte traz críticas à TAR. Nas considerações finais, são destacadas as principais contribuições dessa teoria ao campo.

As bases conceituais da TAR

O princípio da simetria, entretanto, não deve ser confundido com o esforço de tornar diferenças homogêneas ou fazê-las consensuais. Ao contrário, para Latour (1994), o que se deve é buscar dar igual atenção aos aspectos humanos e não humanos de forma a não ditar sobreposições de uma parte sobre a outra. Para Tonelli (2016, p. 384), a partir da simetria generalizada, é possível entender um pressuposto fundamental da TAR, que "é a percepção do mundo sem a divisão de polos distintos em que o mundo, a realidade e todas as entidades atuantes são produto de relações, fabricações e construções intermináveis, em que o objetivo e o subjetivo se misturam e se transformam".

A relevância do rompimento com os dualismos se traduz no próprio nome dado à teoria, em que o mesmo termo traz a conjunção do ator e da rede, e o hífen faz o serviço de representá-los como uma única entidade (LATOUR, 1990). Em outras palavras, o ator - humano ou não humano - se constitui na rede. Ele só adquire identidade e sentido expressivo e material nessa inserção. A realidade, portanto, precisa ser explicada articulando esse emaranhamento, sem isolacionismos que enfatizem apenas um ou outro.

Latour (2012) trabalha as intuições das ciências sociais não por meio de um inventário de respostas, mas por uma lista de cinco grandes incertezas, que incluem questionamentos às formas de a sociologia tradicional tratar:

1. a natureza dos grupos - tratando da forma contraditória de se atribuir identidade aos atores, em que não há grupo relevante, apenas formação de fronteiras dos grupos e de grupos antagônicos;

2. a natureza das ações - em cada curso de ação, toda uma variedade de agentes parece imiscuir-se e deslocar os objetivos originais;

3. a natureza dos objetos - os tipos de agências que participam das interações permanecem abertos;

4. a natureza dos fatos - questão de fato versus questão de interesse, o vínculo das ciências naturais com o restante da sociedade parece ser constantemente fonte de controvérsias;

5. relatos de risco - tipo de estudos realizados sob o rótulo da ciência do social, contendo o próprio ato de escrever relatos. Como o laboratório do cientista social, a tarefa exige perícia e habilidade na escrita para descrever com objetividade as conexões presentes no fenômeno investigado.

A seguir, o Quadro 1 sumariza as cinco incertezas propostas por Latour (2012).

Fonte: Elaborado pelos autores.

A visão de Latour (2012) sobre a natureza dos grupos é a de retirar o pesquisador de sua zona usual de conforto. Para o autor, sua melhor composição vem a partir do mapeamento de suas: a) controvérsias, a partir de traços ou pistas deixados pelas atividades que exercem, e, portanto, rastrear de forma relativista suas conexões sociais sem delimitar contextos prévios; e b) fronteiras, identificando a relação de grupo e grupo antagônico exercida pelos próprios atores. Assim, perde-se uma lista fixa de grupos, estando a validade social nos agrupamentos que podem ser feitos e refeitos pelos atores. Além disso, é pela comparação com outros vínculos concorrentes que se enfatizam conexões e fronteiras. Latour (2012) usa o conceito de infralinguagem e insiste na importância de dar voz aos atores com seu vocabulário próprio, evitando o risco de calá-los a partir de elaborações prévias do pesquisador.

A TAR traz em seu arcabouço teórico uma série de elementos, como mediadores e intermediários, que fazem diferença como meios de se produzir o social na "formação de grupos" que, na verdade, não têm um ponto de partida prévio. "Um intermediário consiste naquilo que transporta significado ou força sem transformá-los" (LATOUR, 2012, p. 65). Já os "mediadores transformam, traduzem, distorcem e modificam o significado ou elementos que veiculam" (LATOUR, 2012, p. 65). Podem ser simples, mas ao mesmo tempo revelar-se complexos em função das várias direções em que podem modificar os relatos atribuídos a seu papel.

Latour também problematiza o entendimento da sociologia convencional para a ação. Para o autor, esta não é algo transparente ou consciente, mas articulado, e é isso que deve ser desemaranhado e descrito pelo pesquisador. Não é o contexto que empurra a ocorrência da ação, e ela não se dá a partir do próprio indivíduo apenas. A ação, segundo Latour (2012), deve ser encarada como um nó de conjuntos de funções a serem compreendidos. O pesquisador não deve tentar responder ou solucionar dúvidas provenientes da ação, ou usar dualidades. A suposta realidade objetiva do mundo nada mais é do que uma produção das redes de relações. Isso não significa dizer que não existam divisões, mas elas são entendidas como efeitos ou resultados, e não algo estabelecido a priori.

Para o entendimento da ação dentro da perspectiva da TAR, um conceito essencial é o de translação (LATOUR, 2000; CALLON, 1986; ). O fluxo de translações dá origem ao próprio nome da teoria (ator-rede), abarcando transformações e transferências simbólicas e materiais incorridas a partir das interações entre os atores. Para Latour (2012), rede não diz respeito a uma coisa ou algo concreto, mas a um conceito que nos revela e permite a compreensão da ação. Os processos de translação se referem aos movimentos dentro da rede, distribuídos em meio a uma infinidade de participantes, que se tornam indispensáveis para que qualquer ação ocorra. Nesses movimentos nascidos no encontro de interesses e possibilidades, os atores se modificam, criando delimitações e negociando margens de manobra para conquistar algo, como um conhecimento, uma competência, em um processo de construir conexões. Portanto, processos de translação nunca são neutros ou sem consequências, deixando rastros e transformando os atores a partir dessa interação.

Latour (2012) propõe uma lista para mapear controvérsias ou diversas posições sobre a ação a partir de uma concorrência de atores, a saber: a) a ação sempre deve aparecer em um relato como um feito; b) deve-se empregar o termo actante, que fornece diferentes figurações, ou formas diferentes de induzir os atores a fazer coisas para as mesmas ações. Segundo Law e Mol (2008, p. 58), "a agência se liberta da intencionalidade, uma entidade torna-se um actante quando faz uma diferença perceptível"; c) os atores legitimam ações e condenam outras e, com isso, reforçam a formação dos antigrupos que estão no entorno de seu mundo social; e d) os atores podem ter suas próprias teorias da ação para explicar como se produzem seus efeitos, o que aproxima a TAR de um processo de fabulação.

A partir delas, há de se ter uma visão mais clara das posições dos atores na medida em que se aprofunda em um estudo de retórica da controvérsia. É possível, assim, "manter os objetos por mais tempo como mediadores visíveis antes de se tornarem intermediários invisíveis", ou "meros transportadores do peso causal da matéria implicada nas ações da sociedade" (LATOUR, 2012, p. 120 e 125).

Rejuvenescendo os estudos de consumo a partir da TAR

A influência da TAR nos estudos de comportamento do consumidor se manifesta de diversas formas, indo desde a adoção de alguns de seus conceitos de forma isolada, como a noção de agência dos objetos, até a incorporação mais densa e articulada do vocabulário e dos fundamentos teóricos da TAR. O presente artigo não tem por objetivo inventariar todas as citações existentes dos trabalhos de Latour, e Law dentro do campo, mas oferecer uma genealogia de artigos que adotaram de maneira mais completa e abrangente o arcabouço teórico da TAR. Assim, deixaram-se de fora dessa discussão, pesquisas que fazem citações isoladas, sem efetivamente adotar a TAR como lente teórica a organizar a investigação do fenômeno.

Este levantamento não teve a pretensão de ser exaustivo, mas privilegiou os principais periódicos de consumo internacionais, como Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Theory, Consumption, Markets and Culture e Journal of Consumer Behaviour, nos últimos 10 anos. Os artigos discutidos a seguir representam, assim, trabalhos relevantes na utilização dessa teoria, evidenciando o potencial de crescimento da discussão da TAR no campo do consumo. Entende-se que esse retrato pode contribuir para ampliar a inserção dessa teoria e dos debates que ela suscita nos estudos no Brasil.

No estudo sobre consumo mundano por meio de carrinhos de compra (COCHOY, 2008; GRANDCLÉMENT, 2006), viu-se que o consumidor é resultado do encontro entre habilidades humanas e objetos retratados, em que se associam, combinam ou trocam propriedades entre si para dar conta de dada tarefa social (LATOUR, 2012). Pelo simples "espaço móvel" do carrinho de compras, é possível que seu "empurrador" cumpra alguns objetivos como consumidor. Eles vão desde empurrar grandes quantidades de produtos, do cálculo (e do decálculo), até os mais qualificados, como a decisão do que se pode ou não consumir. Nesse cenário, o consumidor pode considerar ou não uma lista de compras, refletir sobre o orçamento familiar, fazer julgamentos da performance de produtos na percepção da maioria coletiva, observando o que se tem em carrinhos de compra e nos olhares para prateleiras. Assim, faz-se um trocadilho com as palavras "cálculo" e "quálculo" para mostrar essas diferenças entre um mero cálculo de preços e um julgamento mais amplo do processo de compra, que inclui, entre outros aspectos, o volume do carrinho, a interação com as prateleiras e os outros consumidores no supermercado. O estudo de Cochoy (2008) permite observar a transformação de um consumidor individual em um coletivo - um cluster - em torno de um mesmo carrinho de compras, objeto que passa a funcionar como articulador do traçado de um consumo coletivo. As escolhas são não apenas pensadas, mas formadas pelas vibrações invisíveis existentes nas trocas de pessoas e coisas no ambiente de consumo, assim como na esfera política.

Em outro trabalho, Cochoy (2014) propõe refletir sobre o paradoxo das teorias de cocriação a partir de TAR, utilizando-se do caso empírico do uso de códigos de barras bidimensionais. O artigo mostra que os consumidores trabalhadores vivem dualidades entre os níveis passivo/ativo na relação de cocriação. O consumidor é ativo no nível físico, mas passivo nos níveis cognitivo e político, não percebendo que sua atividade se transforma em execução passiva de scripts e tarefas delegadas. Cochoy (2014) espera mostrar que o comportamento do consumidor é mais bem compreendido, evitando quadros e debates políticos ou teóricos remotos, e incidindo sobre a concreta interação entre o consumidor e as "coisas de mercado" com as quais ele se envolve.

Hansson (2015) se detém na investigação da performance do consumidor no envolvimento com objetos móveis em situações urbanas e cotidianas, apoiando-se nos pressupostos da TAR de que humanos e não humanos formam híbridos. O trabalho investiga pais com filhos pequenos em processos de compras. A ideia do autor foi ilustrar dificuldades - sensações de desconforto ao carregar produtos pesados e senti-los como extensão de seu próprio corpo e oportunidades criadas na interação com objetos como bicicletas, carros e carrinhos de bebês. Assim, analisa, por exemplo, experiências de conveniência como carregar o bebê junto ao corpo e poder ficar com as mãos livres por meio do "canguru" e como essa configuração impacta os pais lidando com crianças enquanto vão às compras. A perspectiva da TAR nesse estudo permite observar a troca de competências entre humanos e coisas na tendência da portabilidade e mobilidade, com especial atenção ao envolvimento de mover-se com produtos. Muitas vezes, tais produtos exigem do consumidor um cálculo mais qualitativo de gestos e movimentos, conforme previu Cochoy (2008), e também o ajuste do consumo deles, considerando a coletividade no entorno (CALISKAN e CALLON, 2010).

Epp e Price (2010) adotam a perspectiva proposta por Latour para evidenciar o consumo como um fenômeno de rede a partir do contexto de pequenos coletivos - as famílias. O pressuposto da TAR que se adotou foi o de natureza da formação de grupos, natureza da ação e natureza dos objetos. O estudo demonstra como objetos compartilhados puderam ser trocados, consumidos, tornavam-se singularizados, e como de alguma forma seus fluxos eram interrompidos por alguma inatividade, podendo ser recomoditizados e, eventualmente, mantidos ou não nessa rede. Analisando os esforços da família para manter uma mesa de jantar herdada e importante em sua história, Epp e Price (2010) enfatizam a estabilidade que a materialidade proporciona, as dinâmicas de significados e a agência dos objetos. A partir dos processos de movimentação da mesa, analisam a transformação da rede e, em que medida, objetos podem ser substituíveis mesmo quando associações icônicas ou indexadas persistem. Usam a perspectiva da agência dos objetos para explicar esse achado e abordar objetos de herança não apenas com seus links simbólicos, mas também como objetos com dimensões materiais, seus espaços, histórias e funções na rede.

Türe e Ger (2016) também destacam a agência dos objetos e o entendimento de prática como rede para estudar as relações com relíquias herdadas. As autoras investigam como o consumidor resolve as tensões envolvidas na relação com tais objetos, como as relações entre o passado e o presente, quando tradição e modernidade são simultaneamente desejáveis, abrindo espaço para a transformação desses tipos de objetos, até então tidos como inalteráveis de forma a não ameaçar sua autenticidade. Segundo as autoras, a transformação é o caminho para negociar tensões da temporalidade existentes entre passado, presente e futuro.

Bettany e Kerrane (2011) lançaram mão dos pressupostos da TAR de supressão dos dualismos para entender o consumo do galinheiro de plástico "Omlet Eglue" dentro da cultura de granja de manutenção urbana. O produto, com sua fácil manutenção, atingiu status de cult entre galinheiros urbanos e produtores "amadores". O trabalho descreve o equipamento como um ator ambíguo no meio cultural de granja urbano como meio de contestação às grandes corporações da indústria alimentar. O galinheiro se torna, assim, um nó ambivalente por meio do qual comportamentos de anticonsumo e resistência são configurados. As contribuições de Bettany e Kerrane (2011) reforçam que anticonsumo e literaturas de resistência do consumidor refletem um campo repleto de inconsistência aparente e dissonâncias do próprio comportamento anticonsumo. Para resolver isso, as autoras seguiram pesquisadores que têm destacado a necessidade de abordagens mais holísticas, em vez de dissecar, isolar e criar rotulagem como consumo ou anticonsumo (MORAES, SZMIGIN e CARRIGAN, 2008; NEWHOLM, 2005; CONNOLLY e PROTHERO, 2003), e, além disso, indicaram que as análises mais produtivas orientadas a objeto vêm dos interstícios desse dualismo subjacente (BINKLEY, 2008; CHERRIER, 2009).

Estudos recentes utilizaram-se da TAR para entender não apenas as cenas de consumo, mas, de forma mais ampla, as dinâmicas de mercado, apoiados pelos pressupostos da TAR de que humanos e não humanos formam híbridos. Giesler (2012), por exemplo, investiga o processo de legitimação da marca Botox a partir das interações e disputas de diversos atores, como os gerentes de marca, os consumidores e os ativistas que se posicionam contra o produto. Martin e Shouten (2014) enfocaram o fenômeno da corrida minimoto supercross (MMSX) para entender a criação de novos mercados. Alinhados à concepção de Caliskan e Callon (2010), os autores entendem mercados como arranjos sociotécnicos ou agenciamentos que organizam a concepção, a produção e a circulação de bens. No lugar de entendê-lo como de cocriação, interligadas em cadeias de suprimento, produtores e clientes. Investigando humanos, não humanos, e atores híbridos, Martin e Shouten (2014) identificaram as condições em que consumidores se alinham a lógicas de mercado existentes e cocriam novas relações no lugar da simples adoção passiva de ofertas da indústria, como sugere a visão tradicional de formação de mercados. O Quadro 2 procura sintetizar e destacar os principais conceitos da TAR e sua utilização pelos estudos de consumo.

Pressupostos da ANT

Trabalhos em consumo

Abordagem do trabalho

Contribuição teórica

Fonte: Elaborado pelos autores.

Métodos adotados em estudos de consumo a partir da TAR

A TAR, bem como as demais ontologias orientadas aos objetos, instiga os pesquisadores a desenvolver novos cominhos metodológicos para a condução da pesquisa social. Fox e Alldred (2015, p. 406) destacam que é fundamental que o estudo "não compreenda a análise de um indivíduo, ou sujeitos isolados, experiências ou sensações e, sim, um conjunto de humanos e não humanos, animados ou inanimados, materiais ou abstratos e o fluxo de efeitos nessa rede". Para isso, devem-se ter em vista "o material e o cultural nos níveis macro, meso e micro de forma conjunta". Os autores propõem ainda "explorar os movimentos de agregação e desagregação e consequentes efeitos econômicos e micropolíticos que tais movimentos podem desencadear". Assim, como exemplo, uma entrevista com um informante não deve ter o significado de se obter uma representação subjetiva, mas, sim, de ser uma evidência de como respondentes se situam nesses agregados sociais. O método de observação deve se fazer presente em estudos de TAR. Os tipos de dados também devem ser dos mais variados, sem ter um foco específico nos objetivos, crenças e valores humanos da experiência de pesquisa antropocêntrica.

A pesquisa de Epp e Price (2010), por exemplo, fez uso de um estudo de caso longitudinal, ao longo de dois anos, com observação dos movimentos a que era submetida uma mesa da família. O trabalho incluiu entrevistas em profundidade e triangulação por meio de informantes, eventos em momentos múltiplos no tempo, de forma interativa entre teoria e dados.

Cochoy (2008) se utilizou de um conjunto de métodos complementares sem intenção de triangular e, sim, tirar o maior proveito do que cada método poderia oferecer. No trabalho, além da observação participante, os autores se debruçaram sobre um grande banco de dados de materiais variados, como fotos, notas de campos, artigos científicos e jornalísticos, sites, entre outros. Os pesquisadores produziram ainda três observações quantitativas, inspirados no método de gravação em vídeo utilizado por Paco Underhill (1999) no varejo. As imagens permitiram detectar gestos dos consumidores em atos de compra que poderiam ser considerados insignificantes, mas que podem tornar-se extremamente significativos ao serem gravados, comparados e agregados. Com a primeira observação, foi possível gerar mais de 700 clusters na entrada do supermercado; com a segunda, outros 700 na caixa registradora (o que carregam, como organizam etc.); e, com a terceira mais 234 clusters no corredor de bebidas. A pesquisa contou ainda com 77 transcrições de pequenas trocas verbais entre consumidores no processo de compra e também com três grupos de foco conduzidos com consumidores com uso intensivo de fotografias para auxiliá-los a se imaginar em situações reais, ativando suas memórias.

Em Hansson (2015), os dados empíricos foram obtidos por meio do método go-along, que mistura entrevistas semiestruturadas qualitativas e observação participante a partir do acompanhamento das famílias em suas rotinas diárias e interrogando-as ao longo do caminho. O trabalho também fez amplo registro visual, na forma de vídeos e fotos. Um dos propósitos principais de usar o método go-along foi examinar o relacionamento dos participantes com o meio ambiente e as coisas, e os aspectos relativos à mobilidade. Dez casas foram envolvidas no estudo, em que famílias com crianças foram selecionadas, pelo método snowball, por causa de pesquisas anteriores, indicando seus relacionamentos especiais em relação a práticas de mobilidade e de consumo. Questões como fase da vida, idade, tempo, dinheiro e preferências foram previamente mapeadas na investigação, o que de alguma forma contraria as recomendações da TAR. O método dirige a atenção para a personificação do movimento com objetos. Consumidores motorizados foram apresentados primeiro, seguidos pelos consumidores de ciclismo e, finalmente, por aqueles consumidores equipados com carrinho de bebê. Os casos apresentados ilustram algumas das dificuldades e oportunidades que os pais abordados na pesquisa vivenciam no processo de compras com seus filhos.

Em Cochoy (2014), o método não é aplicado a partir de hipóteses estabelecidas a priori, seja a cultura do consumidor, seja a alienação de mercado. Em vez disso, ele tenta iniciar a partir de casos empíricos cujos resultados são o resultado de ações de rede em curso. Essas ações combinam-se a todos os tipos de elementos, sejam eles humanos ou não humanos, culturais, sociais, econômicos ou materiais (por exemplo, no caso de marketing, consumidores, produtores, propagandas, produtos e prateleiras). Nesse estudo, a TAR tenta descrever e desdobrar esses processos do trabalho em rede e suas bases. Dependendo de para onde eles levam, a TAR formula as conclusões que se encaixam. É essa rota pragmática, empírica, que Cochoy (2014) se propõe seguir, a fim de explicar as atividades dos consumidores e ver se eles devem ser interpretados como cocriadores ou não, como uma expressão de cultura, como uma evidência de exploração econômica ou como algo diferente. De forma prática, o método combina fontes primárias e secundárias sobre a história do autosserviço e, em seguida, utiliza o estudo de caso sobre a escolha do consumidor.

Em Bettany e Kerrane (2011), observa-se um projeto etnográfico multi-site de um ano sobre as ações de manutenção de granja urbana no Reino Unido, onde foram feitos encontros em uma miríade de locais, conciliando observações e entrevistas em profundidade.

Em Martin e Shouten (2014), os autores recolheram todos os dados primários por meio de entrevistas e observação. A corrida MMSX foi o ponto de entrada para o mercado, mas não foi o único ou mesmo o principal foco de atenção. Foram entrevistados promotores, pilotos, suas equipes de apoio, espectadores, patrocinadores. Houve entrevistas formais e também informais, sendo todas elas desestruturadas, usando-se de sondagens conforme necessário para obter depoimentos dos informantes com minimotos. Interrogaram-se aspectos materiais de suas experiências. Também foram investigadas as relações fechadas entre os atores por meio da observação. Em eventos de corrida MMSX, observaram-se ambas as atividades de front e de bastidores.

Em síntese, os trabalhos que se utilizam da TAR precisam se valer de métodos capazes de investigar o fenômeno no contexto em que se realizam. Essa se torna uma condição fundamental para fazer jus a três pressupostos dessa teoria. O primeiro deles diz respeito a contemplar não apenas a agência humana, mas também o não humano. Assim, torna-se imprescindível ir além do discurso dos entrevistados, incluindo métodos capazes de captar a materialidade na cena de consumo. Em segundo lugar, os métodos de observação também se tornam fundamentais para a compreensão dos híbridos que se formam, dos processos que os mantêm coesos e das transformações que a rede opera nos atores. Por fim, a abordagem microssocial se apresenta como ponto de partida para um novo entendimento dos fenômenos, sem se render a formulações teóricas ou conceitos prévios. Latour (2012) rejeita o que ele chama de atalhos ou acelerações, dando o exemplo do sistema financeiro internacional. No lugar de explicar o fenômeno a partir das noções abrangentes como poder ou capitalismo global, o autor sugere o exercício sistemático de traçar conexões, evideciando, por exemplo, todas as relações que se estabelecem a partir de um escritório de investimentos financeiros de Wall Street. Estas incluiriam os terminais da Bloomberg, os procedimentos de cálculo de risco, os movimentos inesperados dos competidores, as grandes perdas ou lucros. Como argumenta Latour (2012), é exatamente essa perspectiva minuciosa que permite tornar visível uma estrutura completamente misteriosa e pouco compreendida anteriormente.

Críticas à TAR

A TAR recebe muitas críticas pela maneira política como se posiciona em face da ciência, da tecnologia e, principalmente, da sociologia tradicional. Ao propor a ênfase na construção de descrições dos actantes no lugar de explicações baseadas em teorias prévias ou interpretações do pesquisador, Latour contesta o modus operandi da produção do conhecimento científico. Uma crítica usual à TAR seria a de que ela termina sendo descritiva, sem se propor construir uma teoria. Para Latour (2012), entretanto, boas descrições seriam mais úteis para explicar o social do que as explicações resultantes de enquadramentos teóricos prévios e interpretações centradas na voz do pesquisador, que desconsideram a dos atores envolvidos na ação.

Ainda que ) busque um alinhamento recompensador entre a TAR e os estudos de consumo, em sua visão a TAR por si mesma é tida como uma teoria ainda em curso, múltipla e precária, na medida em que seus princípios de abertura e simetria são tidos como escorregadios.

Ingold (2012), antropólogo ligado aos estudos naturais e que advoga pelas causas da cultura material, tece críticas a Latour, porque o autor, assim como Heidegger, não consegue concretizar distinção entre objeto e coisa. Ingold (2012) destaca ainda que, "no lugar da oposição entre sujeito e objeto, confinados em seus respectivos domínios da sociedade e da natureza, Latour cria associações entre humanos e não humanos os ajuntando sempre em coletivos" (INGOLD, 2012, p. 436). Aponta ainda que seus objetos não humanos são completamente inanimados. Em linha com esse argumento, Borgerson (2014) aponta que a TAR incita uma complexidade de efeitos da rede que negariam a função da percepção humana. Nesse sentido, esses autores se contrapõem à perspectiva materialista proposta por Latour, por esta relativizar a esfera de escolhas e valores humanos.

Miller (2005), por sua vez, questiona a supressão de dualidades como proposta por Latour (2012), abolindo noções como sujeito versus objeto, natural versus social, estrutura versus agência, contexto versus conteúdo. Miller (2005) aponta que Latour jamais se descreveu como um pensador dialético. Talvez porque "para Latour a dialética hegeliana amplie o abismo entre os polos de sujeito e objeto que visa preencher" (, p. 99). Isso é mais ou menos o oposto do que Miller sugere, e este não vê mérito em uma disputa na qual os acadêmicos influenciados por Latour acusam pensadores dialéticos de reter o dualismo de sujeitos e objetos que eles afirmam ter transcendido. Da mesma forma, pensadores dialéticos fazem a mesma acusação aos seguidores de Latour. Para Miller (2005), em linha com a definição de materiais de Ingold (2012), quando Latour enfatiza objetos da ciência, em vez de artefatos, perde-se algo de qualidade, pois o artefato é impregnado com criatividade e histórico prévio. Na visão de Miller (2005), é o artefato que é o foco de habitus de Bourdieu.

Sobre a agência dos objetos, Miller (2005) confronta Latour (1993) e ) para destacar a prevalência da agência humana sobre a agência dos objetos. Na visão de Miller (2005 sobre Latour, o autor estaria procurando os não humanos abaixo do nível da agência humana, ou seja, privilegiando a percepção humana em primeira instância. Em uma perspectiva similar, para Miller (2005, Gell está olhando através de objetos para incorporar a agência humana. Ingold (2012) destaca que a visão de agência do objeto por meio das qualidades (tátil, visual, olfativa) e de suas propriedades (que podem ser inconstantes e mutáveis) faz com que um objeto ofereça certas respostas e restrinja que outros objetos sejam possíveis. No entanto, percepções, memórias, pensamentos e ações residem nos indivíduos. Borgerson (2014), em questionamento da visão de Law sobre agência, acrescenta que o autor se defronta com um conflito quando trata dessa temática ao fazer referência ao perigo das coisas, à fascinação que exercem sobre os indivíduos e a como podem interferir na capacidade de testemunho sobre interações e intervir em relações.

Considerações finais

Teorias servem como lentes que recortam a realidade e permitem destacar determinados aspectos, enquanto deixam outros de fora do campo de análise. Com a TAR não poderia ser diferente, e as críticas endereçadas a esse projeto teórico constituem o saudável exercício de evidenciar as limitações dessa abordagem. Entretanto, é inegável a importância da TAR para rejuvenescer o olhar científico a partir das imbricações criadas entre o humano e o não humano, a natureza e o social. Nesse ponto, torna-se oportuno jogar foco nas contribuições da TAR para a área do consumo e marketing.

Dentro dos estudos de consumo, uma das possibilidades trazidas pela TAR foi a de problematizar o foco no indivíduo usualmente investigado a partir de relações de consumo diádicas. Assim, no lugar de pesquisar a relação direta e isolada do consumidor com um objeto de consumo ou uma marca, a TAR permite perceber relações "emaranhadas" entre indivíduos e objetos durante a ação de consumo (COCHOY, 2008; EPP e PRICE, 2010; JENKINS, MOLESWORTH e SCULLION, 2014; HANSSON, 2015). Nessa nova perspectiva, nenhum consumidor é uma entidade durável, pronta ou acabada, mas, ao contrário, se constitui nas relações entre pessoas, objetos e significados dentro das redes de que participa (COCHOY, 2008; EPP e PRICE, 2010; HANSSON, 2015). Por essa ótica, ações de consumo não são realizadas por seres humanos sozinhos, mas pela mobilização de uma rede de entidades.

Mais do que múltiplos atores, a TAR permite renovar o olhar para as relações entre sujeito-objeto, abolindo a hierarquia entre humanos e não humanos e borrando os limites entre uns e outros por força da troca de propriedades entre si. Essa característica permite reconhecer a importância dos processos de aprendizagem e de arranjos de competências no contexto dessas redes. É interessante notar ainda que há um senso de "aprendizagem coletiva" como pano de fundo que também estabelece trocas durante as ações de consumo. A TAR enfatiza, assim, os aprendizados coletivos e mundanos que superam conexões cognitivas, econômicas e culturais a partir da ênfase nos aspectos da sociomaterialidade contida na cena de consumo e em seu entorno.

Ao superar as dualidades sujeito-objeto e entender as relações entre consumidor e a materialidade à sua volta, constituindo novos híbridos, a TAR nos oferece novas perspectivas de simetria ontológica para a investigação, a respeito da trajetória de indivíduos e dos objetos de consumo, sem privilégios de um ou de outro. Nenhum ator tem mais importância em detrimento do outro, e é essa perspectiva que configura diversas redes heterogêneas que se agregam, se desestabilizam, se reconfiguram e/ou se desagregam. Esse olhar se mostra particularmente oportuno para investigar novas realidades de consumo direcionadas pela tecnologia, em contextos como a internet das coisas e das comunicações máquina-máquina (HOFFMAN e NOVAK, 2016). A TAR oferece recursos para capturar não apenas a camada implícita, tácita ou inconsciente do conhecimento humano, mas também a agência material das coisas que instilam relações com consequências de longo alcance. Esse é, por exemplo, o caso de dispositivos que interagem uns com os outros, em certos casos, criando consequências não óbvias para a apreensão e compreensão humanas. Um exemplo trivial dessa dinâmica é o dos algoritmos que executam um conjunto complexo de escolhas selecionando resultados específicos aos usuários. ) argumenta ainda que, com a capacidade da TAR para pensar em termos de extensas redes heterogêneas (LATOUR, 1988), os estudiosos do consumo podem considerar mais seriamente o consumo em sua ligação inerente à produção e problematizar a relação de consumidores ativos, sujeitos e objetos de consumo passivo, desprovidos de sua complexidade e potência material e tecnológica (BETTANY, 2007; ).

Outra inovação sugerida pela TAR dentro do campo diz respeito à necessidade de ajustar o olhar sobre a formação de grupos/agregados tendo em vista o senso de existência no mesmo coletivo. O campo do consumo se mostra desafiante para o pesquisador na tarefa de configurar e formar grupos. Os trabalhos comumente desenvolvidos sempre têm preocupação em mapear previamente os perfis, recortar públicos consumidores ou agregados sociais a partir de critérios, como de segmentação. Normalmente, adota-se esse procedimento como um ponto de partida. Ao evitar tais distinções iniciais, a TAR oferece ferramentas para superar explicações baseadas em aspectos demográficos - idade, sexo, classe social -, que há muito não conseguem dar conta da complexidade dos fenômenos de consumo. A própria prática de gestores de marketing tem revelado a fragilidade desse processo prévio de agrupamento, diante, por exemplo, de casos de produtos e marcas adotados por grupos incongruentes com a proposta original da oferta. No lugar de explicações fortuitas baseadas em motivações internas ou aspiracionais, a TAR oferece uma abertura para pensar essas relações surpreendentes de forma mais complexa, incluindo os incentivos e as barreiras oferecidos pelas redes e os contornos da materialidade.

Conforme proposto por Fox e Alldred (2015), as ontologias orientadas ao objeto como a TAR sugerem um alinhamento do material e do cultural nos níveis macro, meso e micro de forma conjunta, contrariando formas tradicionais de pesquisa na área que privilegiam a observação do consumo no contexto individual do consumidor. ) também aponta um alinhamento de contexto e conteúdo que explore não apenas um primeiro plano de consumo, ou um contexto, mas também o circunscrito de um pano de fundo maior, como um macrocontexto, tal como um efeito local oriundo de uma causa global. Isso requer a capacidade de observar a realidade social pela concepção de uma rede de associações que nasce do mapeamento das conexões sociais produzidas pelos próprios atores e mediadores, e não pelo enquadramento do pesquisador em elaborações teóricas prévias, que determinam o que seria da ordem do micro do ou macrossocial, do local ou do global. A ideia é que o pesquisador analise o fenômeno mantendo o olhar centrado na realidade social investigada, nas ações dos atores e na riqueza das descrições, sem o emprego de divisões, julgamentos ou contradições, baseados em conceitos prévios e intermediários. Assim, segue-se o estudo com uma visão mais holística, permitindo ainda que o não humano possa contribuir para o entendimento do humano, considerando a realidade social.

Ao dissecar as conexões teóricas da TAR com os achados dos artigos do campo, bem como apresentar os principais aspectos metodológicos desses estudos, buscou-se contribuir para que pesquisadores brasileiros ampliem o leque de metodologias de pesquisa em consumo e incrementem o processo de teorização nessa área. A partir do diálogo com a pesquisa que tem sido produzida e publicada nos principais periódicos internacionais dentro da área de marketing e comportamento do consumidor, pode-se observar que a TAR tem estado presente no consumo tecnológico e conectado, na ênfase nas habilidades e aprendizagens de consumo dos indivíduos e agregados sociais, nas transformações dos objetos e em seu poder de agência. Essa presença demonstra que ainda há espaço para avançar e independe da relevância de contexto geográfico e cultural do qual a pesquisa está sendo conduzida.

Assim, a TAR tende a ser particularmente interessante aos estudos brasileiros por impelir uma abordagem que emerge do campo, evitando frameworks teóricos prévios para explicar determinada realidade social. Nesse sentido, serve de estímulo para que pesquisadores brasileiros abdiquem de explicações oferecidas por teorias produzidas em outros países. Por outro lado, a TAR também pode ajudar a equalizar diálogos de pesquisadores mundo afora. Insistindo na investigação exaustiva dos atores e suas conexões diretas, essa teoria tem o mérito de oferecer descobertas a respeito daquilo que é singular, mas também universal, na realidade brasileira.

No Brasil, ainda são escassos os estudos que aplicam a TAR à área de marketing (LEME e REZENDE, 2016). Assim, o presente trabalho contribui para a compreensão das potencialidades dessa teoria para os pesquisadores dessa área. Para isso, o artigo apresentou uma síntese da visão conceitual da TAR, suas origens e diferenças ontológicas e epistemológicas que constituem sua base teórica. O trabalho evidenciou ainda como os principais conceitos da TAR se operacionalizam em pesquisas de consumo recentes, publicadas em periódicos internacionais. Ao articular a literatura recente e ainda dispersa que aplica a TAR dentro do campo de marketing e consumo, pretende-se estimular o desenvolvimento de pesquisas que se utilizem dos recursos oferecidos por essa teoria. Este trabalho evidencia alternativas de se fazer pesquisa a partir de uma mudança de olhar e conduta do pesquisador sobre as relações de consumo e sua materialidade.

Como trabalho teórico, o artigo apresenta diversas limitações, que servem como possibilidades para estudos futuros. Por não pretender fazer um levantamento exaustivo da TAR, mas apenas um retrato dos artigos mais influentes que se utilizam de forma consistente dessa abordagem, o trabalho não chega a fazer um registro abrangente da influência dos trabalhos de Latour, Callon e Law no campo. Nesse sentido, mostra-se oportuno o esforço de um estudo bibliométrico que ofereça uma mensuração acurada da presença da TAR, indicando as redes de publicações, pesquisadores e temáticas associadas a essa teoria. O presente artigo também se apresenta como um instrumento de revisão das perspectivas usualmente adotadas pelo campo do consumo, como a fenomenologia e a cultura material, a partir dos recursos oferecidos pela TAR. Dado nosso objetivo de inventariar os conceitos fundamentais e o uso da TAR no campo, não foi possível uma comparação mais exaustiva dessas abordagens. Assim, um estudo futuro pode evidenciar com mais profundidade as nuanças e potencialidades de cada uma dessas abordagens. Adicionalmente, a TAR se insere dentro do repertório das ontologias orientadas ao objeto, que incluem outras abordagens, como Assemblage (DELEUZE e GUATTARI, 1987; DELANDA, 2006) e Entanglement (HODDER, 2012; 2016), entre outras. Um trabalho que pode contribuir para o amadurecimento do conhecimento em torno da TAR e dessas outras propostas seria o de comparar e contrastar essas novas ontologias, evidenciando seus pontos de convergência e divergência

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Actor-network theory: new perspectives and contributions to consumption studies

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Artigo Teoria Ator-Rede: novas perspectivas e contribuições para os estudos de consumo Teoría del actor-red: nuevas perspectivas y contribuciones a los estudios de consumo Nota-se um crescimento do uso da Teoria do Ator-Rede (TAR) em várias subáreas da administração, como organizações, estratégia e marketing.

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Virtuality and the Problem of Agency in Object-Oriented Ontology

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Virtuality and the Problem of Agency in Object-Oriented Ontology

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Virtuality and the Problem of Agency in Object-Oriented Ontology

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In his Prince of Networks , Graham Harman reconstructs Latourian critique of concepts of potentiality and virtuality with which he claims to agree. This seems striking because Latour’s arguments seem to be exactly those Harman rejects in his other writings as overmining. Furthermore, this critique of potentiality and virtuality creates a dividing line between Harman and Bryant’s Democracy of Objects , where the concept of virtual plays a central role. In this article, I will explore this debate, focusing on how the concept of virtuality works in the context of the ontological realism that Object-Oriented Ontology is. To do this, I will first present Bryant’s notion of virtuality focusing on the problem of the individuality of the object. Then I will explore Latourian–Harmanian arguments against virtuality and show that the main issue Harman has with virtuality has to do with the agency of objects. Therefore, I claim that the main dividing line between Bryant’s and Harman’s versions of Object-Oriented Ontology is the difference between the two notions of agency.

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"Human being is what occurs when a human becomes aware of those relationships objectively, which, normally, in everyday life, takes the form of recognizing something as external to the self without cognizing a relationship in a formal sense at all. Thus, to be aware of the furniture in one’s home and the need to walk around sofas, chairs and tables is an expression of relationships whether or not they are recognized and conceptualized as such."

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By Ron Richardson

Jaromir Funke - Untitled, c. 1923

The prospect of memories, equivalent to the known world, lures me into dark territory I might otherwise ignore. Yet, once I've sifted all I can retrieve there remains an absent other, silent and persistent beyond my power of recollection, something to which I am constantly relating that gives my being continuity and stability.

If I am in perpetual relationship to something surely it ought to exist here with me. Yet there seemed nothing, past or present, but what I had encountered all of my life, other people, animals, plants and things. There was no mystery about my interaction with other people. It happened all of the time. It occurred face-to-face and at a distance by merit of my inextricable and unavoidable situation in the human community. Whenever I thought about anything I used language and engaged images which were the common property of humanity. Nothing I thought or did could ever be mine alone. Yet that did not seem enough. There was something thicker going on, something not so clear cut. Animals and plants, particularly trees, had always been a powerful influence on me. Since early childhood, from my farming days I'd been in relationship with them. The Boy Scouts extended the engagement into the wilderness. However, there were no plants or trees inside my house, nor except for the occasional dog were there animals. Something was missing, something that could account for my occurrence even when I was alone, away from nature within the depths of my study.

I was musing on these thoughts one day as I absentmindedly sauntered about my house, when I carelessly stubbed my toes against the leg of my oak desk. There was the annoying feeling of having done something stupid followed immediately by the sense of delayed pain on its way, as the impulse travelled from my toe to my brain. I was about to curse at the desk when I caught myself and laughed. Something my son said at three and a half nearly forty years before had suddenly come to mind. He had run across the living room without looking, collided with a chair and fell hard to the floor. Getting up, he pointed to the chair and said angrily "Look what the chair made me do!" I laughed then as I laughed now and thought how childishly I was about to behave, when the thought came to me as an enlightenment: He was right! At the time, I had explained to him how his carelessness and not the chair had caused his fall. I was helping him develop mental attitudes, templates for explaining causation in a way calculated to give him maximum control over himself and his environment. But now, as I thought about his comment, I realized he was right. Despite his carelessness the chair had caused him to fall by being in his way. My son had seen clearly, while I had persuaded him to shift his perception in a way that reinforced his agency and took it away from the chair. Immediately it came to me. There was something I was always in relationship with no matter where I was, whether sleeping or awake, conscious or unconscious, young or old, and that something was neither hidden nor concealed. The perpetual presence defining me as present was the object. I was unaware of this fact because in growing into a mature and responsible human being, a modern self, I had denied agency to objects and centered all agency in humans. I had pushed them into the background as things to use and define as I saw fit, as tools, equipment, furniture, raw materials of every sort, or simply what was in the way. This was an extraordinary revelation, changing the way the entire world appeared to me. The most obtrusive, and the most easily missed, nearly invisible characteristic of our world is the presence of objects and their perpetual, inescapable influence on us. Once I realized how profoundly they shape my life I was astonished I had never noticed before.

Jaromir Funke - Still Life, c. 1923

The first and fundamental recognition was the fact we do not simply use objects because objects are not here for our use. Before we can use it the tool must be made. I am not positing here primarily a conceptual construction, which is certainly influenced by the object and what it allows us to do with it, but an actual physical fabrication from materials that have been prepared, changed from preexisting states as trees or rocks for example. They are here for themselves as we are here for ourselves and in both cases being here means being for others whether those others are humans or physical objects, not from volition but unavoidably. We can only 'use' objects by entering into relationships with them and cooperating with them to obtain the ends we seek. But since we are always already in relationships with objects entering into a relationship with an object actually means changing an already existing relationship. When we enter into such relationships, often motivated by the need to change objects to facilitate attaining our ends, we too are changed by the objects we engage with. When we seek to learn how to work with an object which we require to attain some end we are seeking to be changed by interaction with it. Moreover, since we are always already in relationships with objects of one kind or another, and since there is never a time when any human being is free of such relationships, human being entails, in fact, means to be in relationships with objects. It could not exist apart from such relationships. This is true of so-called natural objects such as trees, rocks, mountains, lakes, oceans and so-called 'man-made' objects such as furniture, houses, clothing, tools automobiles, and planes. Human being means being in relationship with objects.

In all of our so called 'uses' of objects we must interact with them largely on their terms. We cannot simply 'use' them just like that, but can only make use of them according to their nature, or we can also say according to their way of being. They compel us to interact with them in specific ways, not simply as we wish, even when we succeed in employing them for our own ends. This includes even our volition in deciding to 'use' a certain object. For example, when early humans decided to make hand axes their mental action of deciding expressed a prior interaction with stone which informed them about its potential for chopping, hammering or scrapping. The idea was not simply the automatic, spontaneous, autonomous result of a human mind's capacity to think symbolically. Indeed, that very capacity existed, and was only capable of existing, within an already established relationship with the material world that called it forth. Not only did that world, including the body, impose needs upon the human being but it also suggested how those needs might be met, could be met and could not be met. Of course, what we call human beings were always already actively engaged in multiple relationships with the material world and we are not to conceive of early humans as initiating such relationships as humans but of inheriting them from their non-human ancestors. That inheritance would have included cultural understandings of things and their possible uses.

Thus, a hand ax could not be made from just any rock but needed a rock that could be worked efficiently. This knowledge, ultimately derived from experience with rocks, which would have been passed down through generations and could eventually come to be thought of as expressing human wisdom independent of the objects themselves, would always be based on interaction with objects, as any craftsman would have soon discovered, since the material could only be worked in ways that were suitable to its physical nature. If struck the wrong way, the rock would not chip effectively but splinter and fragment. Knowing which rocks to use for which purposes, how to work the rock properly - craftsmanship - thus expressed a relationship between rock and human with the human adapting its movements to the nature of the rock, and this kinesthetic engagement developed human understanding of the body as an immediately available and potentially available object, the one closest at hand. However, we cannot move or act in any way we want in regard to objects. When we seek to pick up a rock, it resists, a resistance we interpret as weight, which induces a compensatory adjustment in our muscular skeletal response. We may even have to train or develop our muscles in order to be able to pick up rocks of a certain weight, while remaining unable to move others without engaging social networks and the technology associated with them. Our motility is modified by the objects we encounter and must unavoidably encounter in the world.

A lore might develop around stone working craft that perhaps even endowed certain rocks or all rocks with particular characters or spiritual significance. The example of arrowhead production among Native Americans makes the same point on a larger and more sophisticated scale. In that case trade routes developed to obtain raw materials for arrowhead production, and subsidiary supporting industries, such as hunting for trade pelts or making wampum belts could be seen as extended relationships with the natural objects needed to produce arrowheads, relationships that extended to modifying human behavior on the individual and group level. Science and technology are vastly more complicated relationships with objects requiring advanced educational training. In this way, one may view all of human society as conditioned and refined by human interaction with objects, by which we are forced by their nature to adapt to them in order to make use of them, and to train our minds in quite sophisticated methods of discovering their ways, how they might be used and how best to use them to our own ends. Of course, we do not think of ourselves as doing any such thing. Rather we pride ourselves on "taming" the natural world by the strength of human intellect. This is a mere human conceit, perhaps engaged to make it easier for us to mobilize our own powers by narrowing our awareness of influences acting on us, and to preserve a certain homocentric view of existence. It may be for this reason we tend to restrict the notion of agency to living creatures, and especially, to human beings and deny it to objects.

Although agency simply means the power to cause an effect, and as such includes forces of nature as well as objects, we usually understand it to apply to the willful decisions of conscious actors. At the same time our use of objects is explained entirely by the human attempt to achieve human ends, and not by the unavoidable need to adapt ourselves to the objects around us, whose very existence, as such, requires we enter into relationships with them largely on their terms and not ours. Thus, no matter what the Paleolithic hand ax maker may have wished they would never succeed in turning a rock into a hand ax, or later into an arrow head simply by looking at it, or stroking it in a kindly manner, or talking to it gently or soaking it in water overnight. They could only achieve their ends by working the rock in the specific ways the constitution of the rock permitted, a technique that would have been demonstrated by a mentor or that they would have discovered on their own through trial and error, knowledge which in either case would be based on experience with rocks, that is on interaction with them.

These observations are made more interesting when we consider we really do not know what objects are independently of our interaction with them. There is something there transcending our interaction with the object that makes our interaction possible by the bare fact of its existence. However, what we know of things is not the result of our mind's construction of sensory intuitions presented by them, as Kant had it, but the product of our interaction with them, which also produces ourselves. The relationship between ax maker and rock produces both rock and human being. Objects have assertorial agency as opposed to willful agency. Their agency is apodictically demonstrated by the sheer fact of their existence.

This statement seems to make no sense if we consider that objects are unable to avoid being used by us while we are free to use them or not to use them, even if not doing so would greatly inconvenience us or even end our existence. This seems undeniably true. Though the ax maker is forced to use the stone in a manner consistent with its properties the stone can never avoid being used. Where then is its agency? All this means, however, is that objects do not have human agency. They are not human beings. They cannot escape being used by us but neither can we escape dependence on them, and it is that dependence, rather than the object's ability to move under its own power that is its agency.

In other words the agency of objects is a function of our dependence on them, which is, in turn, a fundamental structure of human being. Another way of formulating this statement is to say that human being is structured by its fundamental engagement with the objects amidst which it always and already finds itself. In fact, human being consists in relationships with objects, other life forms and itself in that human being occurs, and only occurs in relationship to them. Human consciousness emerges in, is directed towards, shaped by and understands itself in terms of those relationships. Human being is what occurs when a human becomes aware of those relationships objectively, which, normally, in everyday life, takes the form of recognizing something as external to the self without cognizing a relationship in a formal sense at all. Thus, to be aware of the furniture in one's home and the need to walk around sofas, chairs and tables is an expression of relationships whether or not they are recognized and conceptualized as such.

Jaromir Funke - Ccomposition Glass Plate, c. 1923

When my son reacted to his fall by blaming the chair he was responding to objects the way we all do until we are taught otherwise. As we all do, my son soon learned to regard objects as nothing more than things for our use or obstacles in our way. Under the guidance of adults and the prodding of other children we come to assimilate to ourselves all responsibility for our encounters with objects. Those who do not are regarded as immature, odd, even mentally and emotionally disturbed. No doubt our world loses something of the enchantment of childhood once we mature in this way. In return we augment enormously the autonomy, and thus, the aggressive power of the self by making it solely responsible for all of its interaction with objects, except for those accidental encounters that no one could avoid, such as a brick falling from the tenth story of a building and striking the unsuspecting pedestrian on the head. Even in such circumstances we look for a human agent to hold responsible, the carelessness of a building inspector, perhaps. In our normal interaction with things, sole responsibility is attributed to people, a way of being that strengthens the notion the self is free to determine its actions with the physical world. This emancipation places the physical world at the disposal of the self as a factor that need not be considered in any determination of the causes of one's actions. Nor need we trouble ourselves with an object's wishes, in considering using it for a particular purpose. We can simply regard it as a natural or human made resource. Once again, we find the tactic of narrowing at work. Put metaphorically, by narrowing responsibility for almost any outcome involving our interaction with objects we drain spiritual power from objects and absorb it into ourselves. The result is a far more powerful self and a far less powerful, interesting and consequential object. Narrowing agency to volitional acts obscures the impact of objects on us in shaping our existence.

These ruminations led to another surprising consideration. One consequence of our unavoidable interaction with objects, including our own bodies, is being compelled to act as their nature dictates. Neither objects nor our own bodies allow us to do two things at the same time, or to achieve our ends all at once. To make a hand ax we must chip a core. To gain muscle mass we must lift weights. Both activities can only be done incrementally, never all at once. In other words, our relationships with objects entail duration. Objects, including the body, do not allow simultaneity. If I stub my toe the impulse must travel along my nerve pathways before it reaches the brain, so there is always a moment's interval between the impact and the occurrence of pain. Duration is not a human creation. It is imposed on human beings by the nature of the object world. In this sense, we can say metaphorically, that temporality is produced as a byproduct of our interaction with objects. Put another way, time and space are functions of our interaction with objects. Metaphorically, we could say that the resistance of objects to our attempted use of them creates temporality, that temporality occurs when human beings interact with objects. But since human beings are always already in relationship to objects temporality always already exists. It is a priori as Kant posited but not because it is a structure of the human mind, but because it is an expression of the unavoidable, inextricable relationship of humans and objects, from conception. But while humans cannot exist apart from that relationship, objects did and can and will probably continue to do so without us. If, when I withdraw into deep meditation, time and space appear to disappear, that is because I have reduced my consciousness of interacting with the material world, my body, the floor I sit on, the roof over my head, the sound of the clock, the heating system. However, I am still actually interacting with that world. I continue to sit on the floor and to inhabit my body. The roof remains over my head. The clock ticks in the background. I cannot separate myself entirely from objects. Which suggests why even in the deepest meditation there remains some sense of time and space, though remote and 'distorted'.

There is an obvious objection to this proposition. Granting our interaction with objects involves doing one thing after another and forbids us doing everything simultaneously, why do we experience this as duration? It would seem duration requires a prior sense of temporality. However, the problem is resolved when we consider we are always and already in relationship with objects from conception, that there is no a priori state, because there is no state when we are not interacting with objects. This perpetual relation is what creates temporality, not the interaction with specific objects. We come into the world as temporal beings. Kant was right in positing time and space as a priori categories through which the mind apprehends the world. However, he was wrong in assuming because they were a priori they were not based on experience. He neglected the always already existing relationship between humans and objects that begins with conception and never ends. Even in our prenatal state we are interacting with our body and our mother's body. As a result we are temporal before birth. Everything we experience from that moment on reinforces our temporality. One might object that this only pushes the problem back before birth, rather than explains the where the notion of temporality comes from. My response is that the sense of duration, the feeling that "time" is passing, and the sense of space, which is the recognition that I am not something, is produced by our interaction with objects, and both exist in some manner prior to birth, because, "we" are in relationship with objects from conception, even in our most biologically simple state, prior to self-consciousness as we know it. Temporality is what it feels like to interact with objects.

I began to think I had found the missing being I was relating to. It was none other than the object, the entire material world, including our bodies in which we are always-already-and-unavoidably-embedded. There has never been a moment in my life, from conception, in which they are or could be absent. They are with me intimately, incessantly, a relationship even death cannot destroy, at least in regard to my body. It can be said in very truth that objects give meaning to us.

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The prospect of memories, equivalent to the known world, lures me into dark territory I might otherwise ignore. Yet, once I've sifted all I can retrieve there remains an absent other, silent and persistent beyond my power of recollection, something to which I am constantly relating that gives my being continuity and stability.

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"... we want to know why the demonstration of a beam of light that is reflected at a low angle off the table top to the wall had a dramatic influence on the students’ belief that the table can exert a force..."

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"Do we learn about the table compared to other tables through Picasso’s portrayal of it, or do we learn about Picasso’s painting compared to other paintings through the agency of the table he portrays?"

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Nothing is so conditional, let us say circumscribed, as our feeling for the beautiful. Anyone who tried to divorce it from man's pleasure in himself would find the ground give way beneath him.
- Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1889

I want to talk about the way contemporary Americans talk about the things they find beautiful, because they talk about them all the time, and when they do, they use the word 'beautiful' with consistency and precision in a very traditional way that dates back to the Renaissance and beyond that to Latin Antiquity. In this vernacular usage, the word 'beautiful' bears no metaphysical burden. It signifies our anxious pleasure at something that transcends the merely appropriate and asserts the relative value of that thing over other things of its kind. In everyday talk, the word usually occurs as an exclamation occasioned by the speaker's involuntary positive response to an object or event in the external world, and, more often than not, these vocalizations are followed by conversation, by analysis and negotiation, agreement or dissent, coalition or faction. Herein lies the mystery.

The visceral, involuntary pleasures that occasion such exclamations are by definition personal, private, and self fulfilling, so why make them public? Why utter the word 'beautiful' at all? And why respond when someone else does? For three reasons, I think. First, we speak the word and respond to it because we are good democrats who value transparency and consensus and occasionally long for them. Second, we speak the word and respond to it because we are citizens of a self-consciously historical society that values eccentric personal responses on the grounds that these responses, made transparent, may not be eccentric at all, may in fact presage a new consensus. Third, we speak and respond because we can, because we live in a society in which the Pursuit of Happiness is an officially sanctioned endeavor.

Thus, for Americans, the experience of beauty is necessarily inextricable from its optimal social consequence: membership in a happy coalition. So talk follows naturally from our experience, and in this we are the direct descendants of those Renaissance artists, mercantile princes, and connoisseur churchmen who spoke of beauty the way we do. These sixteenth-century Italians, in their idolatrous avarice and retrospective reverence for Pliny and Cicero, reinstated an antique artistic discourse maniacally obsessed with the paragone - with the argumentative comparison, competition, and ranking of things like-to-like. Aiming at the establishment of objective standards, these devotees of the 'new learning' considered and reconsidered, in taxonomic hierarchy, the relationship between one design and another, one painting and another, one artist and another, one genre and another, and one art and another.

The consequence of these speculations, however, was not the establishment of objective standards but a permanent and profoundly democratic revolution in the way we look at things. Official authority was subverted and its rhetoric disabled by the logic of the paragone. Under the auspices of this method, authorized instrumentalities of sacred devotion and political power were transformed into objects of delectation - freely elected to serve this function by private citizens through the exercise of comparison and connoisseurship. Works once presumed to express the authority of their origins were taken to represent the content of their admirers' taste, and for the first time in history, the power to invest works of contemporary art with meaning and value began to shift from the supply side to the consumer side.

From this point forward, the ongoing, unrequited argument about relative beauty became more and more inextricable from the habits and conventions of the mercantile republics in which it had flourished since the days of Rome - equally indebted to the conventions of representative democracy and to the dynamics of commerce. The whole business of ascertaining the relative value of comparable objects, after all, derives in its every aspect from the practical paganism of commercial life. There is no other precedent, and the site where such value is adjudicated is by definition a marketplace. In practice, this site is more of a meta-marketplace in which buying and selling are largely symbolic, something closer to a civil forum in which objects are elected by free-floating constituencies to represent shared pleasures and desires.

In this way, rather casually, the practical paganism of commercial life is reconfigured into a practice of engaged connoisseurship designed less to ascertain the value of objects than to externalize and socialize the values of their adjudicators in a multivalent world where face value, more often than not, is the only value there is. As Nietzsche would have it, these adjudications function as a public modality through which we socialize our pleasure in ourselves; and this, I would suggest, is why contemporary Americans talk about the things they find beautiful and talk about them all the time. We are citizens of a secular commercial democracy, relentlessly borne forth on the flux of historical change, routinely flung laterally by the exigencies of dreams and commerce, and bereft of those internalized commonalities of race, culture, region, and religion that purportedly define 'peoples.'

As such, we are a social people charged with inventing and perpetually reinventing the conditions of our own sociability out of the fragile resource of our own private pleasures and secret desires. Lacking even the most basic prerequisites for relating to one another, we choose to correlate, to define our commonality with reference to an ever-changing panoply of external objects and occasions. We gather around these objects and occasions as about a hearth, as lines of force around a strange attractor; we organize ourselves in non-exclusive communities of desire, then stay or go according to the whims of sublimated romance and the weather of the times. As a modality of social organization this dynamic system may be construed as beguiling or appalling according to one's taste, but there is no denying its efficacy and appropriateness - or the complexity of its provenance, which is the subject of this essay.

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WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers on such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
- The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Since we are talking about beauty here, I must insist at the outset that, even though the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence is not a particularly beautiful sentence, the idea of American beauty could not exist without the cool impudence of its first seven words. In a single phrase, these words exempt the sentence's subsequent assertions of human equality and unalienable rights from the claims of traditional conduct, metaphysical certainty, and scientific proof. They do what the thirteen colonies were themselves doing. They declare their independence and divest themselves of external authority. They say, "WE hold these Truths to be self evident," not "These things are true," or "These things have always been true," or "These propositions have been proved to be true," or "These truths, validated by scripture . . . ." They don't even say, "These truths are self evident." They say that the Second Continental Congress holds the subsequently enumerated Truths to be self evident on its own authority, and, henceforth, within the purview of this authority, they shall have the status of law. Period.

The sentence's assertion of equality and unalienable rights derives absolutely from the authority of the 'WE' that begins it. This WE (the Second Continental Congress) derives itsauthority from the consent of the Governed, whose authority derives from the fiat of the opening clause, as well. Thus the circularity: The Second Continental Congress legally empowers the people to empower the Congress to empower the people. Upon this self-contained legal fiction, this donnée, the United States was founded on forms and principles designed to guarantee, with qualifications, its polity's equal right to Life, Liberty, and Happiness. Equality is posited without qualification, whether it exists or not. Life and Liberty are negatively conflated under the rubric of Safety. The right to Happiness (whether it exists or not) is restricted to the pursuit of it.

To me, this final permission to pursue happiness has always been the most alluring. By distinguishing safety from happiness, it introduces an element of dynamic instability into public governance and invests the now neglected discipline of eudaemonics with legal consequence, subsuming the entire realm of commercial and institutional interest beneath it. In most writing about the republic's primal texts, this phrase is given rather short shrift. 'The pursuit of happiness' is simply presumed to be a Lockean euphemism that guarantees the pursuit of commerce and industry under the purview of contract law. It certainly is that, but the phrase is not dead language. It derives from a rhetoric in which commerce and industry are said to produce and disseminate 'goods,' (which is to say virtues incarnate), and Happiness, in the locution of the Second Continental Congress, is the Good toward which all these goods aspire.

Moreover, the panoply of goods produced and disseminated under this legally protected right to pursue happiness extends well beyond objects of use and consumption to intellectual and artistic properties, as well. And since we are all free to pursue our own happiness, the relative value of all these goods is necessarily determined outside the realm of governmental authority, scientific proof, and metaphysical certainty in the externalized, propositional discourses of the forum, the court, the piazza, and the marketplace. Herein lie the pagan roots of the republic, and, with these in mind, it is not particularly surprising that a society whose citizens propose and elect a hierarchy of incarnate creatures to represent them in the realm of governance would propose and elect a hierarchy of similarly incarnate goods to represent their transient and variegated longings. It is hardly imaginable, in fact, that citizens of a society like this, for whom the pursuit of happiness is a primal mandate, would not produce grails to embody the nature of their quest for it - inconceivable that icons of happiness would not proliferate.

Every morning, when I was in sixth grade at Santa Monica Elementary, we stood beside our desks, stared at the flag and, under the baton of Ms. Veronica Chavez, sang "America the Beautiful." La Chavez sang the official line, "Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain . . . ." We sang our own countertext, a paean to beauty in its presence, " Oh beautiful for gracious thighs, for amber babes of Spain . . . ." It was a puerile encomium, to be sure, but I have not forgotten the inordinate pride we kids took in our collective poiesis as we sang out, "Veronica, Veronica, God shed his grapes on thee . . . ." We were less original than we thought, however. Since that time, I have yet to discover a contemporary of mine whose class bards did not invent their own dissenting lyric to be sung to this tune. Somehow (probably thanks to the Second Continental Congress), we all felt empowered to propose our own aesthetic, and we did. We all sang the song, but with our own lyrics, because we all expected our own brand of beauty as a privilege of citizenship, as an icon of happiness, and intended to pursue it.

Responding to our youthful expectations, the city of Santa Monica presented us with beautiful things at every turn and with many things that were not beautiful at all. At recess, milling around in the asphalt schoolyard, we continued to sing the same song with different lyrics. We beach dudes would extol the sublimity of mountainous, smoking surf; we would deplore the grungy indignity of city buses. Fledgling Bukowskis among us would take exception to this anti-urban cant, as would the barrio kids for whom nothing not cars or music or Veronica qualified for serious contemplation. So the argument would bubble along - the song holding us together and the lyrics setting us apart. In this haphazard manner, the vernacular discourse of beauty flourished at Santa Monica Elementary, and not one of us would have quarreled with Baudelaire's dictum in the Salon of 1846 that "there are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness."

Nor would any American today quarrel with Baudelaire. We all seek happiness as a matter of course and call it beauty. We brave crowds to gaze at paintings on the walls of museums. We gather on scenic overlooks just off the interstate. We sit in the stands as the jump shot swishes through the net or the skater smoothly lands. We sit in the audience as the solo or the aria concludes, and, occasionally, in our delight, we mutter this involuntary vocalization: "Beautiful!" - Or, sometimes, we just say, "Great!" - Or, if we reside in the borough of Queens, "Gorgeous!" Then we look around for confirmation or argument. Either will do to begin the conversation, which is always a dicourse of value for which the only qualification is a shared experience of some correlative object or event.

Because of mass production, mass communication, and sheer mobility, a vast repertoire of such objects and events is available to us. We all see a lot in this country and see a lot of the same things, and, having these things in common, and little else, we talk about them obsessively. We may acquire knowledge and self-knowledge from such a conversation, but neither is required to begin it. We can talk about beauty with anyone and we do. We can talk about it anyplace and anytime after the encounter, because we know it when we see it and we remember it well enough that its perceived absence informs our recognition of the banal and the grotesque - the existence of which few have the temerity to question.

John Ashbery once remarked that, after we discover that life cannot possibly be one long orgasm, the best we can expect is a pleasant surprise. I like to think of encounters with beauty in just this sense, as pleasant surprises. These are far from daily occurrences in any society, but they do happen. We encounter the embodiment of what we like and what we want in the external world and we are delighted. Something connecting our bodies to our minds vibrates like a tuning fork, and the sudden, unexpected harmony of body, mind, and world becomes the occasion for both consolation and anxiety.

In that moment, we are, for once, at home with ourselves in the incarnate world, yet no longer in tune with the mass of people who do not respond as we do. We now belong to the constituency of people who do respond - if such a constituency exists. Thus the urgency of our vocalization: "Beautiful!" Thus our willingness to accost strangers with our enthusiasm, to venture among them in search of co-conspirators. Thus, beautiful objects or events are defined by their ability to reorganize society by creating constituencies around them, and to represent for these constituencies both who they are and what they want - and in a free society the question of what a group of citizens wants is always political.

The resulting din of aesthetic contention is so ubiquitous that it's easy to take for granted. It is equally easy to deplore the daily fret of living in a nation of exquisite connoisseurs where yuppies standing before the pastry case at Starbucks spend more time deliberating on their choice of muffin than you do buying a car. Even so, it's hard to imagine a commercial democracy conducting its business without this ongoing murmur of choice, advocacy, discrimination, and dissent about everything from chainsaws to eyeliner, from Puccini to Jan van Eyck. This chatter is usually dismissed as a defect of consumerism, but it is always less about acquiring things or paying money for them than the ongoing mystery of pleasant surprises - of physical resonance with a world where our own responses matter and our own vote counts.

The experience of pleasant surprises, however, is not local to the social experience of commercial democracies. It is ubiquitous and infinitely variegated because we are all very different and the world is very wide. The discourse arising from these surprises, however, flourishes to best effect in highly mobile, loosely organized, and casually administrated commercial societies whose members feel privileged to respond and must respond, in fact, to conduct their daily business. Better-organized and more rigorously administrated societies, those less practically pagan and restlessly cosmopolitan, cope with pleasant surprises quite differently, simply because the reflexive experience of American beauty is always, potentially, an occasion for changing one's friends, one's fashions, one's furnishings, and one's livelihood - even for changing one's home in the hope of discovering a place of residence that 'feels like home.'

In societies where precipitous changes of this sort are not standard procedure - in tribes, villages, academies, and churches, in laboratories and governmental bureaucracies - the pleasant surprise takes on a darker aspect. In such societies, one's eccentric taste is always more likely to be construed as a threat to the community - as a signifier of disloyalty - than as an icon of aspiration. (As any tribal elder will tell you, the Trojan War was the disastrous consequence of one young man's pleasant surprise, of his cosmopolitan connoisseurship, and don't you forget it.) Accepting the experience of beauty as a straightforward, culturally informed, politically validated, physical response to the external world directs discussions of beauty toward its social consequences rather than its absent causes, and in tribal environments the consequence of espousing a dissenting aesthetic (as each of us do) is always anxiety.

Beauty reigns, if it reigns at all, with the consent of the governed. Those who do not feel free to consent feel anxiety, especially in an obsessively permissive society like this one, in which most of our cloistered citizens are charged with the task of denying us one sort of permission or another. These clerics, bureaucrats, or academics are assigned the difficult task of adjudicating the 'real' value, uncovering the 'true' meaning, and enforcing the 'correct' interpretation of everything from tax returns to literary texts, from scripture to works of art. Out in the street, everyone from the cop on the corner to the drifter he's hassling is a brazen, chattering aesthete sporting impudent opinions in lieu of green carnation, and the minions of correct interpretation must be forgiven their annoyance at this tumult.

They are, after all, disinterested professionals, and the vernacular discourse of beauty is in no sense a professional or disinterested endeavor. It is a discourse of engaged beholders - quite literally a colloquy of amateurs - and need be nothing more. It pertains to our Safety and Happiness, to the dissonance between the two, and our wistful expectation of feeling simultaneously at home in our bodies, in the world, and in society. It is also a civil institution that is only imaginable in a society whose primal texts assert the priority of eudaemonics - a society where we are led to expect first-rate representation in the world from senators, congressmen, lawyers, paintings, landscapes, and pop tunes.

3
The first time I was in Rome, [in 1506] when I was young, the pope was told about the discovery of some very beautiful statues in a vineyard near S. Maria Maggiore. The pope ordered one of his officers to run and tell [my father] Giuliano da Sangallo to go and see them. He set off immediately. Since Michelangelo Bounarroti was always to be found at our house (my father having assigned him the commission for the pope's tomb) my father wanted him to come along too. I joined up with my father and off we went. I climbed down to where the statues were when immediately my father said, "That is the Laocoon, which Pliny mentions." Then they dug the hole wider so that they could pull the statue out. As soon as it was visible everyone started to draw, all the while discoursing on ancient things, chatting as well about the things in Florence.
- Francesco da Sangallo, in a letter, 1566

During the fifteen and sixteenth centuries in Italy, a loose confederation of artisans, church decorators, and visual educators created a body of pictures whose authority and immediacy completely eclipsed the agendas they were designed to promote. In recognition of this achievement, the canon of precedence that ranked visual objects in the period was redesigned. The special category of cultural and commercial value previously restricted to works of classical antiquity was tacitly extended to include the work of these contemporary masters. In 1605, this expanded category was con- firmed in writing by the city of Florence, which passed an edict expressly forbidding the sale and export of any work on any subject by eighteen artists from all over Italy. The list included Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, del Sarto, Correggio, Parmigianino, and most of the rest of the Italian canon - most of whom have remained canonical.

All of the artists whose work was singled out in the Florentine edict had executed permanent public works for churches and civic buildings throughout Italy. The objects at issue in the edict, however, were those viscerally persuasive, visually dazzling, readily portable paintings on canvas and panel whose most amazing attribute in their own time was the scale of their public vogue - their celebrity in a fame-crazy culture, their burgeoning marketability in a renascent commercial society. It is equally true, of course, that the work was idealistically inspired by the rational, corporeal authority of classical sculpture - that it was rather casually informed by the pagan cosmopolitanism of Roman learning, and justified, as often as not, by the casuistry of fashionable Neoplatonism. It is also undeniable that, regardless of their secular accouterments, these paintings and the artists who made them remained fully complicit in the incarnate mysteries of primitive Catholicism and indebted to its ideologies.

The conflicted debt these paintings owed to contemporary fashion, primitive Catholicism, and classical paganism is most succinctly demonstrated by the agendas and controversies that swirled around their greatest technological innovation: the invention of oil glazing. This practice of applying transparent layers of pigment suspended in oil one over the other created the ravishing surfaces whose luminosity became the trademark of this painting. Since it mimics the layering of skin, the invention itself probably derived from observation. The practical virtue of this layering, and doubtless part of its raison d'être, was first its stunning rhetorical acuity, and second its ability to approximate in painting the seductive corporeality and translucency of antique objects carved in marble.

The theological occasion for this invention was purportedly to make the doctrine of the Incarnate Word visible and palpable in portrayals of Christ (and particularly the Christ-child). This doctrine was the primary tenet of Western Catholicism, and since the glazed surfaces of this new painting allowed ambient illumination to pass through levels of transparent color and bounce back so the paint appeared to hold the light and glow, this seductive simultaneity of light and gross material was taken as a metaphor for Christ's simultaneous mortality and sanctity as the eternal word of God made living flesh. In everyday practice, however, oil glazing was never actually restricted to painting the body of Christ. The physical, theological metaphor of luminosity was immediately extended and transformed into a metaphor for the presence of grace - for the visible investment of a body with some aspect of sanctity. This justified the use of oil glazing to portray kings, patrons, princes, saints, and bystanders.

In very short order, entire paintings were bathed in atmospheric sourceless radiance - directionless and therefore timeless. (The seventeenth century would bring to painting the ruthless diagonal light that insists upon the unstable contingency of historical time.) The luminous ambience in sixteenth-century paintings, however, was not properly a metaphor for timeless grace. It was more accurately an incarnation of it, since the visibility of grace in Renaissance theology was not a metaphor, but a fact. The theological presumption was that grace was perceptible, that it could in fact be seen. (This is why church deliberations about the attribution and assignment of sainthood remain obsessed with eyewitness accounts, with witnessed miracles, witnessed good works, witnessed aura, etc.)

So, if grace is signified by its visibility and confirmed by being seen, what is the status of objects whose physical luminosity represents the state of grace? A person invested with grace is a visible saint. An object invested with grace is a sacred icon. What, then, is a painting that incarnates with breathtaking authority the mimetic image of creatures who embody the luminosity of eternal grace? A mimetic picture, after all, is not a Byzantine ideogram that stands in for a word - or The Word. It is a persuasive representation that stands in for the absence of its physical subject. Thanks to oil glazing, however, such paintings seemed something more than mimetic pictures; they were in fact incarnations of mimetic pictures.

Let's say we have a painting of Christ. Is this a picture, an icon, or something else? If it is only a representation of the historical Jesus, then this picture stands in for the absent Christ and signifies his absence. Yet Christ, conceived in grace, is never absent. To presume that the picture might embody Christ's eternal presence, however, allows the inference that a man-made representation of Christ might incarnate his presence, and now we are playing rather fast and loose with the Second Commandment. The solution to this theological double entendre favored by the Roman church was to construe these works as images of the once and future Christ whose life on earth was historical and will be again, whose spiritual presence is eternal and signified by incarnate luminosity. This idea that works of art might exist in a condition of simultaneous absence and presence, as representations and incarnations, has persisted throughout the history of Western art, secular and sacred, and reached its modern apotheosis in impressionism.

The critical issue in Catholic Italy, the source of this once and future visible enhancement, is not explained by this explanation. Beyond Christ, who was conceived in a state of grace, everyone and everything else in a state of grace must be invested from without. Tangible relics invest icons with grace according to the Catholic Church, and the Church itself invests human beings. Protestants and dissenting Catholics believed human beings could be invested with grace directly by God himself, without clerical mediation, and held all objects or images purportedly invested with sanctity to be nothing more than false idols, pagan simulacra of Christianity.

In retrospect, one can't help but suspect that these issues of incarnation and idolatry, of grace and its investiture, would have remained moot without the challenge of Renaissance painting, which confounded representation and incarnation and mimicked the luminosity of grace. These issues did arise, however, and the continuing impact of these theological niceties on secular painting is inescapable. Even today, the phrases 'craven idolatry' and 'commodity fetishism' may be substituted for one another with no loss of sense. The idea of grace as sanctity-visibly-confirmed translates so easily into the idea of beauty-that-need-only-be-seen-to-be-believed that it's hard to imagine the latter without the former. The intellectual constructions of an object in a state of grace and that of a work of art in an autonomous state of quality, goodness, or beauty are virtually identical: both the artwork and the icon are presumed to embody, in the present moment, a condition of ahistorical, visible authority.

The question remains, however, for saints and paintings alike: What is the source of this invested value? Does the saint's state of grace derive from God directly or from the church? Does the painting's self-evident authority derive from the institution that sponsored its creation? From the artist who created it? From God who inspired the artist who created it? From the scriptural criticism and scholarship that interprets it? From the instructive value of the stories it portrays? Or could this painting possibly derive its authority from a constituency of beholders who have actually experienced its power, agreed upon its loveliness, and, in word and deed, publicly confirmed its value?

In the history of commentary on art, all of these sources of authority have been passionately defended except for the last one. Even though enthusiastic secular constituencies undeniably created the public vogue of Renaissance painting, and this public vogue created the beaux-arts tradition, most commentators hesitate to acknowledge this circumstance. Presumably the colloquy of enthusiasts talking around and about a work of art evokes the noisy chaos of a souk and calls up the image of feckless Israelites dancing with abandon around the golden calf. If it does, it should, since neither of these evocations is inaccurate or nondescriptive. Both exempla are implicit in the scene described by Francesco da Sangallo of the chattering crowd gathered around the pit from which the Laocoon has just been exhumed.

Everyone present at the excavation of this wonderful object is drawing, talking, comparing, and appraising. The Laocoon, mythically risen from the earth, is at once a golden calf, an object of commerce, and the incarnation of an ancestral text. Giuliano da Sangallo, who recognizes the statue from a passage in Pliny, is an architect by profession. Michelangelo Bounarroti is both an artist and an architect. On this particular occasion they are both commercial agents of the pope, and it's hard to see how this circumstance might diminish our assessment of either man. Contributing to the rescue and preservation of the Laocoon is hardly an offence against culture, while ignoring the impact of commerce and consumption on the history of art does in fact qualify, since it simplifies the picture without improving it and leads us down the garden path toward the noxious habit of explaining the flowering of Renaissance painting in terms of 'insight,' 'inspiration,' and 'creativity.'

I am much more comfortable tracing the origins of this flowering to the late Middle Ages when the Catholic Church began outsourcing its decoration piecemeal. Over the next few centuries, the sacred orders traditionally entrusted with in-house decoration were gradually reassigned, and outsourcing became the norm. By the late mid-fifteenth century, the visual rhetoric of Western Catholicism could be said to reside firmly in the hands of private providers overseen by commissioning bishops and scholarly iconographers. At this point, the Church in Rome, as an image-provider, began to function as a public-private conglomerate surrounded by a satellite ring of competing subcontractors. (One thinks of Brunelleschi and Ghiberti's competition to portray the sacrifice of Isaac in the doors of the baptistery of Florence Cathedral in 1401, the outcome of which launched Ghiberti on a career of bronze doors and drove Brunelleschi into architecture much to his chagrin and our own joy.)

Over the years, this outsourcing arrangement had a three-fold effect on art practice. First, unlike the artisans of sacred orders, these new subcontracting artists, artisans, and ateliers, vying for competitive advantage, strove for distinction, evolving trademark styles by investing their production with idiosyncratic strategies and mannerisms (on the principle that if you get your style on the ceiling you are more likely to get the commission for the nave). Second, the practice of stealing, borrowing, refining, and inventing that the struggle for distinction entailed began to erode the integrity of regional artistic idioms. Expatriate artists and artisans, brought to Rome by provincial popes to celebrate their papacies in local styles, did not go home. They stayed in Rome, absorbed local influences, and continued to compete for work in an increasingly cosmopolitan stylistic environment.

Finally, and most importantly, the Church's public administration of private art practice created, early on, a nascent art world populated by connoisseur churchmen well versed in artistic practice and conversant with its classical and contemporary texts. Since these clerics commissioned and oversaw the production of works of art whose ideological content was identical by fiat, they evaluated the work of artists one to the other according to its formal and rhetorical acuity. These gentlemen of the church were not, after all, going to artists to 'get the Word.' They were going to artists to get the Word made flesh, and there can be little doubt that without their imposition of ideological consistency, the Renaissance orgy of formal diversification, visual refinement, and technical invention would have been considerably less exuberant. Even with it, the steep curve of escalating sophistication had its darker consequences. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, under the pressure of competition and in response to the challenge of Reformation, painting assumed new grandeur. It also became more cold-bloodedly rhetorical, more calculatedly seductive, and much, much more persuasive.

This regime of escalating professional sophistication almost inevitably recon- figured the relationship between the purportedly religious artist and his audience. Looking back from the vantage point of the early seventeenth century, any knowledgeable citizen could have told you with some authority that the difference between the work of a contemporary like Caravaggio and the work of a fifteenth-century master like Fra Angelico is that Caravaggio wants to dazzle and control us, that the theatricality of his breathtaking illusions has one goal: to make us believe. Fra Angelico, on the other hand, just believes and believes that we believe. This is the source of his power, and, lacking that doubled faith, no subsequent painter has ever approximated Brother Angel's devotional eloquence. One instinctively and involuntarily believes both artists, in other words, but the conditions of that belief have changed. A fifteenth-century art-lover and connoisseur might look at a painting by Fra Angelico and become a Christian. A seventeenth-century Christian gazing at Caravaggio's Entombment might just as easily become an art-lover.

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It is curious that princely galleries were so highly admired during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period during which the hierarchal classification of the arts was taken for granted and the orthodoxy of religious imagery was a matter of real consequence. No one seems to have complained that, by treating portraits on the same level as history paintings and by hanging altarpieces . . . next to scenes of the most enticing eroticism, collectors were defying the considered teaching of churchmen and philosophers in order to create a category of art for which only aesthetic quality needed to be taken into account. It is, paradoxically, not until the nineteenth century when the classification of art by subject matter was in theory becoming increasingly old fashioned that, in practice, a growing number of thinkers began to deplore the situation that had been brought about.
- Francis Haskell, The Invisible Museum

So far, I have tried to characterize the cultural vernacular out of which the beaux-arts tradition arose in the late Renaissance and to characterize as well the contemporary American vernacular into which it has dispersed. Anyone wondering what these boisterous vernaculars might have to do with the domain of fine art proper at the dawn of the twenty-first century should, in truth, already know: they have nothing to do with it. The contemporary street discourse derives directly from a revolutionary way of looking at things that was first validated in Renaissance Italy. This revolutionary mode of address made it possible for private citizens to appropriate and willfully misconstrue advertisements for the church and state as objective correlatives in rituals of social adjudication.

The loose coalition of artists, critics, churchmen, and Renaissance princes who led this revolution founded what we now call the beaux-arts tradition by willfully misinterpreting masterworks of sacred and philosophical art as icons of private desire and personal enthusiasm. They created what Francis Haskell refers to as "a category of art for which only aesthetic quality need be taken into account" - which is not really a category of art at all but a categorical way of looking at art that privileges the quality of the object's consequences over the authority of its causes. In practice, this revolution shifted the power to interpret and preserve works of art from their sponsoring institutions to their volunteer beholders. This enhanced the ability of images to acquire new meanings over time while compromising their ability to sustain cultural meanings and communicate official propaganda or impose official policy.

In this small way, the beaux-arts revolution sounded the death knell for the wars of iconography that ravaged Europe and the Middle East for a thousand years - from the days of the Early Church on up through the Reformation. In recent years, however, the consequences of this revolution have been virtually obliterated in the realm of official culture by a counter-revolution that has taken us back to the day before anyone found any thing beautiful. This counter-revolution - called a 'culture war' and mounted simultaneously by the right and left wings of American culture - has pitted the authority of culture, ideology, and tradition against the pleasures of society, and both wings have won. The right wing has prevailed in the realm of public governance, the left in the realm of institutional and academic culture, and both wings have instituted a new regime of correct speech and correct interpretation.

In this moment of officious triumph, we lost the object. Our right to willfully misappropriate the elegant lies of ambitious power lost its sanction. The privilege of creating provisional icons of sociability out of high-dollar, bravura dreck went into exile on main-street. For five hundred years this privilege of misinterpretation had been society's hedge against rhetoric, its mode of subverting the blandishments of governmental, corporate, academic, and clerical authority. Now no more, except on the street, and it may seem a small thing but the privilege of standing with one's companions before some juggernaut of ill-intentioned bombast selling the pleasures of war, penury, or tribal seclusion - of being able to stand there smiling happily in its presence and say, "Well, isn't that pretty!" is no small thing. It is the essence of liberty and sophistication, the emblem of civilized sedition; and, today, the cultural sites that once preserved our right to be seditious and civilized in this way no longer do. Having won the culture war, the administrators of these once-and-future 'museums' now purport to give us 'good advertising' correctly interpreted to counteract the 'bad' advertising we encounter in the street.

Once again, it's all advertising, and the explanatory texts that deface the walls of these institutions stand as cold evidence of a culture morbidly obsessed with the longevity of its own ideas and morbidly fearful of the perpetual re-allegorization that ensures works of art their longevity. These Nebuchadnezzar-style word-walls that one confronts like quavering Daniel may be read as ironic epitaphs for the beaux-arts amateurs who dreamed these halls of high culture, built them and filled them with works of art now in the custody of philistine colonizers, not one of whom imagines the flowering of the beaux-arts tradition to have been anything other than a viral efflorescence of elitist connoisseurship infected by self-regarding narcissism and nascent commodity fetishism. This, however, is only to say that the temperamental proclivities of administrative bureaucracies in the Christian West have survived without much alteration for five hundred years.

The considered teaching of churchmen and philosophers still holds incarnate beauty to be, at best, the unintended consequence of accident or design and, at worst, plain old craven idolatry. All this means, however, is that the beaux-arts tradition has reverted to the status it maintained for two hundred and fifty years, from the Florentine edict in 1605 until the 1850s when Édouard Manet established the first rigorously beaux-arts practice by speculating openly in the mercantile appetite for pleasant surprises. Until the moment of Manet's emergence, the beaux-arts tradition had no proper objects. It was a responsive, personal, evaluative way of looking. The act of looking was always followed by talking and sometimes followed by the investment of writing or capital in some visual occasion designed for other purposes, or used to other ends. During this period, the beaux-arts appetite for visceral consequences reconciled itself as a matter of course with the official presumption that the utility of art resided in its devotional, ideological, or educational content.

Even reconciled, however, enthusiasm for beautiful things was never considered sufficiently Christian or intellectual or publicly responsible to be a completely respectable social avocation. It remained a vaguely reprehensible hobby that survived under the mantle of its deniability - simply because there was no discernable evidence of its existence. The same works of art, seen differently, could represent the opposing interests of enthusiasts and educators. Connoisseurs, who were also, by happy chance, charged with imposing ideological correctness on paintings, could comfortably commission high pornography in the guise of thoughtful classicism. These naughty bits could then survive in serene duplicity in well-appointed drawing rooms because the aristocrats funding the church and state were also the collectors buying the pictures. Public virtue and aesthetic value coexisted in the same commodities - aesthetic discernment and public authority coexisted in the same adjudicators - and all the funding came, finally, out of the same pocket.

In this sense, the beaux-arts tradition from 1605 until 1850 was an invisible empire - the very definition of what Michel Foucault calls an 'open secret.' It was a social endeavor of which everyone was aware and hardly anyone spoke. Its activities were limited to a small but far-flung circle of producers, consumers, commentators, and facilitators - the sort of people who gathered around the pit and watched the Laocoon being unearthed - and for these people the aesthetic way of looking was presumed to be a privilege of education, rank, and talent. Their adjudications were neither for public consumption nor scholastic disquisition. There were no reporters from "Entertainment Tonight" in 1542 to announce that Cardinal Farnese had just commissioned an odalisque from Titian with the caveat that it be sexier than the Duke of Urbino's. There were no followup stories reporting that the papal nuncio had written Farnese from Venice to reassure him that his odalisque-inprogress made the duke's "look like a frigid nun."

Today, the cardinal's odalisque is presumed on good evidence to survive in the basement recesses of the Vatican (the sexier the nude, one presumes, the deeper the recess), and the duke's odalisque now hangs in the Uffizi, in classical drag, under the pseudonym Venus d'Urbino. During its residency in the duke's bedchamber, the work was simply catalogued as "a painting of a naked woman by Titian." This, however, does not mean that either the duke or the cardinal were unaware of what they had, or unresponsive to the quality of Titian's creations. They, and those who followed them, were demonstrably committed to the work surviving and worldly enough to understand that Western culture does not officially condone high pornography however elegant. Western culture approves of composure ( "Ah, look at the composition"), and consensus (" Ah, the chromatic harmony!"?), and antique learning (" Venus in her bedchamber, how exquisite! "). So if the price of preserving a painting of a naked woman by Titian was pretending to love virtue while actually finding virtue in something you love, that was considered a small enough price to pay.

This congenial state of hypocritical complicity about aesthetic matters sustained itself in happy invisibility until the early nineteenth century when the beaux-arts tradition, catastrophically, lost its 'beard.' The collapse of religious authority and the erosion of aristocratic values forced aesthetics out of the closet, and in the escalating orgy of historical self-consciousness occasioned by this collapse, the frivolous antiques that had been inexplicably preserved by beaux-arts enthusiasts were transformed into icons of the lost past and of the culture's ( Oh dear!) lost values. This occasioned a quantum escalation of art's perceived cultural importance, and rather quickly, thanks to the inordinate amount of longing invested in it, the practice of art itself came to be perceived as the very emblem of human aspiration, self-realization, national pride, historical achievement, and cultural identity.

Even John Ruskin, who was deeply complicit in the propagation of art-as-religion, recognized this for the idolatry it was - and the moment did not last. Instead, a whole array of purportedly scientific teleologies arose to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of traditional religion and aristocratic patrimony, and works of art (now seen as incarnate history) provided an evidentiary symptomology for all of them. Under the auspices of Herder and Hegel, Darwin, Marx, and Freud, new regimes of 'correct interpretation' were instituted, and, plus ça change, works of art were recruited to do for their new bosses the same job they once did for their old ones. Paintings that previously argued for the glorious primacy of church, state, and patrimony now served in circular arguments as both symptom and proof of natural selection, the historical necessity of the class struggle, and the validity of oedipal rage. In other contexts, the art of the past (now 'correctly' reinterpreted) was recruited to validate separatist myths of cultural identity and to reinvigorate regional and tribal traditions.

The putative adversary of all these manly narrative projects, its effete bête noir, was the colloquy of 'inauthentic' Anglo-French constituencies that constituted the surviving infrastructure of beaux-arts society. So it was probably fortunate for these cosmopolitans that, just at this moment, after centuries of collecting and connoisseurship, a rigorously beaux-arts practice was finally established by Manet. The invention of this 'modernist' art may be said to mark the end of the beaux-arts revolution's beginning. Unfortunately, it also marked the beginning of its end. With the invention of the bourgeois art market by Manet and the simultaneous establishment of new 'cultural' regimes of correct interpretation, the co-existence of institutional virtue and aesthetic discernment was irrevocably sundered.

From this point forward, Europeans and Americans engaged in artistic endeavors were divided into two increasingly distinct constituencies. There was a professional class of administrators, historians, and theoreticians concerned with determining and enforcing the correct interpretation of art's original cultural intentions; and an unofficial class of collectors, dealers, critics, and artists concerned with exacerbating the social consequences of art's embodied presence. As the twentieth century progressed, the maestros of correct interpretation, whose original agenda was only to make art more culturally meaningful, became increasingly concerned with making art less aesthetically appealing and less surprising - lest it be misunderstood. At the same time, mandarin aesthetes became similarly engaged in suppressing representation and transforming art into an increasingly embodied, purely 'aesthetic' activity - lest it be misunderstood.

In the late twentieth century, this schism would finally open into an abyss. The conventions of beaux-arts practice would once again dissolve into the cultural wallpaper - this time with no residue of covert complicity in official quarters. As a consequence, the radical social function of the beaux-arts tradition survives in the vernacular discourse of value while its more romantic project of saving everything we ever loved is withering away under the administration of utopian bureaucrats whose only utopian attribute is their visceral contempt for both the relevant past and the physical present. So we should not forget this: for five hundred years, the beaux-arts tradition survived on the revolutionary premise that beautiful art, regardless of its cause or content, is much to be preferred over art that is not so beaux and thus should be preserved - and, further, that works of art, once found beautiful and no longer considered to be, might easily become beautiful again and are thus equally deserving of rescue.

This beaux-arts vision of love's enduring virtue sustained itself while nations rose and fell, institutions flourished and lost their funding, fashions burst upon the scene and just as quickly faded. Under its auspices, beautiful things were not only preserved but also put to use. Objects and images that had long since outlived their cultural contexts, their practical and official utility, were snatched from oblivion, maintained, displayed, and vigorously reutilized through the agency of perpetual reinterpretation. New uses were found for old portraits of dead kings and commoners utterly forgotten. Formal virtues were attributed to brown landscapes. Nouveau story content constantly reinvigorated depictions of lost narratives. Visual arguments in aid of lost philosophies and ideologies now defunct were renovated and renewed as a matter of routine.

Today, all this is over. The past is presumed to be well lost - to be nothing more than a cautionary narrative against which the present must be inoculated. To this end, surviving works of art are summarily banished to the inaccessible dungeons of their original contexts with the inference that resituating the same work in the context of the present is somehow verboten. It isn't, unless the prohibition is against objects themselves, and this would seem to be the case, since even objective evidence of the present is quickly discarded, presumably to rescue the utopian future from the evil influence of this, its reprehensible past. The deficit of pleasure and complexity being incurred by this cultural demolition derby, however, would seem a rather high price to pay to rid us of the casual hypocrisy that preserved the Venus d'Urbino. It is an absolutely outrageous price to pay to deny the undeniable fact that objects of human manufacture have consequences that proliferate far beyond their original causes and that these often beneficent consequences routinely subvert and even repudiate the intentions of their manufacturers.

5
The branch from which the blossom hangs is neither long nor short.
- Krishnamurti

Begin the ending here: Pleasant surprises are a fact. Their social, psychological, and somatic dimensions are radically contingent and infinitely complex, but beyond the opacity of these occasions there is no mystery. The vernacular discourse of relative beauty is a rationally explicable mode of perception that requires nothing more imaginative of its practitioners than a reversal of Western civilization's semiotic priorities by application of the paragone - by habitually looking like-to-like. As Oscar Wilde remarked, "a gentleman always judges by appearances," and we begin our education in doing this with a base premise of American semiotics: that all simple signs have two primary domains of reference. First: all signs that we call signs have designative meanings. They refer to things that are unlike themselves - as words infer their referents, and pictures what they represent. Second: since all signs that we call signs are also things in the world, they have embodied meanings. They reference things that are like themselves - as a word, or a color, or a musical note is known with reference to other words, colors, or musical notes.

No one questions the existence of these two domains. Nor has anyone proposed a formal way of sorting our their tangled skeins of reference. The quarrel, especially in the realm of art, is about the relative priority of these embodied and designative meanings - about what we know through which agency. Do we learn about the king compared to other kings through the agency of his portrait, or do we learn about the painting compared to other paintings through the agency of the king's likeness? Do we learn about the table compared to other tables through Picasso's portrayal of it, or do we learn about Picasso's painting compared to other paintings through the agency of the table he portrays?

There is little doubt that the king's portrait is intended to celebrate the king, and no doubt at all that Picasso's table is intended to celebrate his virtuosity. Free citizens, however, are unbound by authorial intention. They must choose between two readings that require quite distinct ways of looking at the world. In practice, of course, there is no absolute distinction. We are always choosing a reading somewhere between these two extremes and weighted toward one or the other, but, even so: A reading weighted toward designative meaning prioritizes the absent king and the imaginary table. A reading weighted toward embodied meaning prioritizes the paintings. Either is possible. The argument is about which is preferable and to whom.

Administrative cultures, preoccupied with delivering the message, keeping the record, teaching the lesson, and assuring our compliance, necessarily prioritize designative meanings. In order to survive, these cultures need to be relatively certain that we (their auditors) accept what they (our administrators) say that words mean and colors stand for. If we accept our administrators' reading of the world, their ability to control our behavior is considerably facilitated: we stop at the sign and stop at the light as well. The urgency of their concern with teaching us what things mean derives from the fact that the world gets in the way of their authority. Administrative authority depends on designated reference, but like-to-like embodied meanings always have cognitive priority. Most contemporary theorists, in fact, argue that only embodied meanings have even marginal necessity.

When Jacques Derrida asserts that there is no meaning outside the text, he is not arguing for the priority of text, but for the primacy of the embodied relationship between one word and another. He is arguing that any field of designative reference we construct behind the patterned words that compose the text (and the patterned words that express their meanings, and the patterned words that express their meaning, ad infinitum) is radically contingent and literally imaginary. Embodied relationships, on the other hand, are perceptible without designative reference. Their patterns signify for us the possibility of designative meaning, and the actual designative meanings we attach to them are always in some degree up for grabs. A framed pattern of colors may be a picture but not necessarily. A bounded series of words may tell a story or make an argument, but it needn't. Embodied patterns supply our cue to seek out designative meanings, and however well we have been indoctrinated with these designative references, the relative beauty and authority of the embodied pattern itself is determined by us, if we are empowered to respond and pass judgement.

If we do feel empowered to pass judgement, to privilege beauty and dismiss the banal and the grotesque, the seriousness with which we take any designative messages is contingent upon our taste, upon our aesthetic response to the pattern of embodied signs that bear their reference. In this way, the physical existence of embodied signs poses a perpetual threat to bureaucratic authority, and, if we exclude the Orwellian option of simply deracinating our languages, there are three administrative ways of dealing with the problem of taste and compliance. First, one may simply obliterate taste by disenfranchising the polity and denying them their right of preference. In commercial societies, unfortunately, this is an extremely destructive option.

Second, one may engender and promote a quasi-Protestant 'cult of content' in which the relative felicity of embodied and designative meaning is presumed to vary inversely. This is a popular option in contemporary academia, holding, as it does, that bad writing infers good meaning, that ugly painting infers beautiful content, and dissonant noise infers good music. The only legitimate defense of this cult is that, in the flow of things, bad does, on rare occasions, become good, ugly becomes beautiful, and dissonant becomes harmonious. This is not necessarily the case, however, and, in fact, it is never necessarily the case. In the fullness of time, ninety-nine percent of the bad, ugly, stupid, obtuse, and banal remains so, and remains so unmemorable that it sinks into oblivion. Even so, there is always enough of it around.

Finally, there remains the option of teaching taste - of training the bureaucracy in a felicitous mode of embodied expression and educating the polity to appreciate and respond to it. This creates 'appropriate' expression and the whole history of art in the West stands as gorgeous, proliferating testimony to the fact that nothing taught and nothing learned, nothing merely appropriate, can override the revolutionary efficacy of the pleasant surprise. A five-hundred-year tradition of aesthetic discourse once rested upon this principle: that, in the moment of encounter, intricately constructed patterns of embodied reference always have the potential to completely reinvent the past, to reinvent even their own pasts and yield up the future in new, surprising, and totally unauthorized meanings.

This perpetual promise of radical destabilization creates, in any polity conversant in the discourse of relative beauty, a predisposition to oppose established authority at every turn, since the experience of beauty itself invariably overrides it. Confronted with inept administrative expression, we decry its ugliness. Confronted with appropriate administrative expression, we ignore its banality. And on those few occasions when we encounter genuinely beautiful and surprising administrative expression (while standing before a Raphael, perhaps), we feel free to ignore its designative message. We appropriate its embodied mastery to our own purposes and invest it with new social meaning. We expect such opportunities. If the world before our eyes does not adequately represent us, we claim our right to seek out new representatives.

So here, quickly, is the argument: First, I am assuming that human beings in the course of their daily lives will, on occasion, experience involuntary positive responses to configurations of embodied signs, whether these responses are socially permissible or not. Second, I have observed that, when these responses are permissible, we habitually identify the configurations of embodied signs that occasion them as beautiful in the hope of creating constituencies of agreement with our own evaluation. Third, I am arguing that the cognitive priority of such patterns of embodied signs makes beauty a powerful category of value in societies where it exists. For this reason: If beauty does exist in a society as a category of value and if we are among the members of that society who can and do appraise the world before our eyes as a matter of habit, the cognitive priority of embodied signs more or less guarantees that the pleasant surprises we experience in the presence of beauty will function as a hedge against habit and rhetoric - will routinely preempt the blandishments of vested interest, tribal authority, transcendental religion, metaphysical ethics, and abstract philosophy.

Thus, the utility of beauty as a discourse resides in its ability to locate us as physical creatures in a live, ethical relationship with other human beings in the physical world. Natural and man-made objects reside at the heart of this discourse. Since the intentions and values that inform the origins and historical meanings of such objects bear no necessary relationship to any subsequent meanings they might acquire, these physical things provide us with a publicly available, socially accessible correlative, an interstices, or pause, if you will, upon which the past and future may pivot. The past may create an object and that object create the future if we read the physical world as ancient oracles read the entrails of goats and the flight of eagles - if we are sensitive to the past, alive to the present, and alert to the possibilities of the future.

The condition of existence I am describing, of course, is nothing more or less than ethical, cosmopolitan paganism. It is the gorgeous inheritance bestowed upon us by the pre-Christian societies of the Mediterranean whose idolatrous proclivities have never been effectively obliterated or even subordinated in the Christian West. Nor, I would suggest, are they likely ever to be obliterated or subordinated. The pervasive vernacular of beauty is a part of that pagan inheritance. The whole rhetoric of commerce and all the modalities of practical science are a part of it as well, as are the foundational premises of this republic whose framers embraced the first tenet of Ciceronian republicanism which holds that the virtue of any politics is confirmed in the body of the citizen - in the corporeal safety and happiness of that single and collective body.

Defined in this context, the discourse of beauty is an empirical, social practice of valuing that arises out of our relationship with an external world largely bereft of transcendental norms. In practice, it sets us a difficult task. The categorical attributes through which we assign value are as numerous and protean as the Gods of Rome, and amazingly similar in their utility. They fall to hand as we need them - novelty, familiarity, antiquity, autonomy, rarity, sanctity, beauty, levity, solemnity, eccentricity, complicity, and utility - and their value shifts from moment to moment. Moreover, since virtually everything we see, hear, or touch can be bought and can be sold, we must somehow determine the personal and social value of things we know the prices of. And prices are no help at all. Even if we bought everything, bought the whole world, all we could say with certainty is that the value of what we have purchased, for us at least, exceeds the price we paid. We would have to talk it over with our friends, with other people who have bought the whole world or want to, and these people would not be difficult to find. Wanting to buy the whole world is the first condition of cosmopolitan paganism. Beauty arises out of that desire.

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Nothing is so conditional, let us say circumscribed, as our feeling for the beautiful. Anyone who tried to divorce it from man's pleasure in himself would find the ground give way beneath him.

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Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary

1. ( n.) A smooth, flat surface, like the side of a board; a thin, flat, smooth piece of anything; a slab.

2. ( n.) A thin, flat piece of wood, stone, metal, or other material, on which anything is cut, traced, written, or painted; a tablet

3. ( n.) a memorandum book.

4. ( n.) Any smooth, flat surface upon which an inscription, a drawing, or the like, may be produced.

5. ( n.) Hence, in a great variety of applications: A condensed statement which may be comprehended by the eye in a single view; a methodical or systematic synopsis; the presentation of many items or particulars in one group; a scheme; a schedule.

6. ( n.) A view of the contents of a work; a statement of the principal topics discussed; an index; a syllabus; a synopsis; as, a table of contents.

7. ( n.) A list of substances and their properties; especially, a list of the elementary substances with their atomic weights, densities, symbols, etc.

8. ( n.) Any collection and arrangement in a condensed form of many particulars or values, for ready reference, as of weights, measures, currency, specific gravities, etc.; also, a series of numbers following some law, and expressing particular values corresponding to certain other numbers on which they depend, and by means of which they are taken out for use in computations; as, tables of logarithms, sines, tangents, squares, cubes, etc.; annuity tables; interest tables; astronomical tables, etc.

9. ( n.) The arrangement or disposition of the lines which appear on the inside of the hand.

10. ( n.) An article of furniture, consisting of a flat slab, board, or the like, having a smooth surface, fixed horizontally on legs, and used for a great variety of purposes, as in eating, writing, or working.

11. ( n.) Hence, food placed on a table to be partaken of; fare; entertainment; as, to set a good table.

12. ( n.) The company assembled round a table.

13. ( n.) One of the two, external and internal, layers of compact bone, separated by diploe, in the walls of the cranium.

14. ( n.) A stringcourse which includes an offset; esp., a band of stone, or the like, set where an offset is required, so as to make it decorative. See Water table.

15. ( n.) The board on the opposite sides of which backgammon and draughts are played.

16. ( n.) One of the divisions of a backgammon board; as, to play into the right-hand table.

17. ( n.) The games of backgammon and of draughts.

18. ( n.) A circular plate of crown glass.

19. ( n.) The upper flat surface of a diamond or other precious stone, the sides of which are cut in angles.

20. ( n.) A plane surface, supposed to be transparent and perpendicular to the horizon; -- called also perspective plane.

21. ( n.) The part of a machine tool on which the work rests and is fastened.

22. ( v. t.) To form into a table or catalogue; to tabulate; as, to table fines.

23. ( v. t.) To delineate, as on a table; to represent, as in a picture.

24. ( v. t.) To supply with food; to feed.

25. ( v. t.) To insert, as one piece of timber into another, by alternate scores or projections from the middle, to prevent slipping; to scarf.

26. ( v. t.) To lay or place on a table, as money.

27. ( v. t.) In parliamentary usage, to lay on the table; to postpone, by a formal vote, the consideration of (a bill, motion, or the like) till called for, or indefinitely.

28. ( v. t.) To enter upon the docket; as, to table charges against some one.

29. ( v. t.) To make board hems in the skirts and bottoms of (sails) in order to strengthen them in the part attached to the boltrope.

30. ( v. i.) To live at the table of another; to board; to eat.

International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

SHEWBREAD, TABLE OF

(shulchan ( Exodus 25:25-30, etc.); he trapeza kai he prothesis ton arton ( Hebrews 9:2)): For construction, see TABERNACLE; TEMPLE. A rude representation of the table is given on the Arch of Titus in Rome. The bas-relief was measured by Professor Boni in 1905, and the height and width of the represented tables were found to be 48 centimeters, or nearly 19 inches. The table represented is, of course, that of Herod's temple, taken at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. See the author's article on "The Temple Spoils" in PEFS, 1906, 306;.

The table of shewbread is to be distinguished from the altar of incense. It has become the fashion of the newer criticism to deny the existence of the altar of incense in preexilic times, and to explain the allusion to it in 1 Kings 6:20 as the table of shewbread (so in Ezekiel 41:22). The other references ( 1 Kings 6:22; 1 Kings 7:48; 1 Kings 9:25) are dismissed as interpolations. The procedure is radically vicious. The table of shewbread is not an "altar," though the altar is once spoken of as a "table" ( Ezekiel 41:22). There was only one altar of incense ( 1 Kings 6:20), but (in 2 Chronicles 4:8) ten tables of shewbread.

See SHEWBREAD.

W. Shaw Caldecott

"Table" is derived from the Latin tabula, meaning primarily "a board," but with a great variety of other significances, of which "writing-tablet" is the most important for the Biblical use of "table." So in English "table" meant at first "any surface" and, in particular, "a surface for writing," and further specialization was needed before "table" became the name of the familiar article of furniture ("object with a horizontal surface"), a meaning not possessed by tabula in Latin. After this specialization "table" in the sense of "a surface for writing" was replaced in later English by the diminutive form "tablet." But "surface for writing" was still a common meaning of "table," and in this sense it represents luach ( Exodus 24:12, etc.), a word of uncertain origin, plax, "something flat" ( 2 Corinthians 3:3 Hebrews 9:4), deltos, "a writing tablet" (1 Maccabees 8:22; 14:18, 27, 48), or pinakidion "writing tablet" ( Luke 1:63 -a rather unusual word). the American Standard Revised Version has kept the word in the familiar combination "tables of stone" ( Exodus 24:12, etc.), but elsewhere ( Proverbs 3:3; Proverbs 7:3 Isaiah 30:8 Jeremiah 17:1 Habakkuk 2:2 Luke 1:63) has replaced "table" by "tablet," a change made by the English Revised Version only in Isaiah 30:8 Luke 1:63.

See TABLET.

The table as an article of furniture is shulchan, in the Hebrew and trapezal, in the Greek. The only exceptions are Songs 1:12, mecabh, "something round," perhaps a "round table," perhaps a "cushion," perhaps a "festal procession," and Mark 7:4, the King James Version kline, "couch" (so the Revised Version (British and American)), while John 13:28 and John 12:2, the King James Version "at the table," and Tobit 7:8, the King James Version "on the table," represent only the general sense of the original. Of the two regular words, shulchan is properly "a piece of hide," and so "a leather mat," placed on the ground at meal time, but the word came to mean any "table," however elaborate (e.g. Exodus 25:23-30). Trapeza means "having four feet."

2 Kings 4:10 seems to indicate that a table was a necessary article in even the simpler rooms. Curiously enough, however, apart from the table of shewbread there is no reference in the Bible to the form or construction of tables, but the simpler tables in Palestine of the present day are very much lower than ours. The modern "tables of the money changers" ( Mark 11:15 and parallel's) are small square trays on stands, and they doubtless had the same form in New Testament times.

See SHEWBREAD, TABLE OF; MONEY-CHANGERS.

To eat at a king's table ( 2 Samuel 9:7, etc.) is naturally to enjoy a position of great honor, and the privilege is made by Christ typical of the highest reward ( Luke 22:30). Usually "to eat at one's table" is meant quite literally, but in 1 Kings 18:19 Nehemiah 5:17 (compare 1 Kings 10:5) it probably means "be fed at one's expense." On the other hand, the misery of eating the leavings of a table ( Judges 1:7 Mark 7:28 Luke 16:21) needs no comment. The phrase "table of the Lord (Yahweh)" in Malachi 1:7, 12 the King James Version (compare Ezekiel 41:22; Ezekiel 44:16 Ezekiel 39:20 is quite different) means "the table (altar) set before the Lord," but the same phrase in 1 Corinthians 10:21 is used in a different sense and the origin of its use by Paul is obscure. Doubtless the language, if not the meaning, of Malachi had its influence and may very well have been suggested to Paul as he wrote 1 Corinthians 10:18. On the other hand, light may be thrown on the passage by such a papyrus fragment as "Chareimon invites you to dine at the table (kline) of the lord Serapis," a formal invitation to an idol-banquet ( 1 Corinthians 8:10; Pap. Oxyr. i0.11; compare iii.523). This would explain Paul's "table of demons"-a phrase familiar to the Corinthians-and he wrote "table of the Lord" to correspond (compare, however, Pirqe 'Abhoth, iii.4). "Table at which the Lord is Host," at any rate, is the meaning of the phrase. On the whole passage see the comms., especially that of Lietzmann (fullest references). Probably Luke 22:30 has no bearing on 1 Corinthians 10:21. The meaning of Psalm 69:22 (quoted in Romans 11:9), "Let their table before them become a snare," is very obscure ("let them be attacked while deadened in revelings"?), and perhaps was left intentionally vague.

Burton Scott Easton

TABLE OF NATIONS

" 1. The Table and Its Object

2. What It Includes and Excludes

3. Order of the Three Races

4. Extent of Each

5. Sons of Japheth

6. Sons and Descendants of Ham

7. Further Descendants of Ham

8. Sons of Shem

9. Further Descendants of Shem

10. Value of Table and Its Historical Notes

11. Further Arguments for Early Date of Table

1. The Table and Its Object:

This is the expression frequently used to indicate "the generations of the sons of Noah" contained in Genesis 10. These occupy the whole chapter, and are supplemented by Genesis 11:1-9, which explain how it came about that there were so many languages in the world as known to the Hebrews. The remainder of Genesis 11 traces the descent of Abram, and repeats a portion of the information contained in Genesis 10 on that account only. The whole is seemingly intended to lead up to the patriarch's birth.

2. What It Includes and Excludes:

Noah and his family being the only persons left alive after the Flood, the Table naturally begins with them, and it is from his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, that the inhabitants of the earth, as known to the Hebrews, were descended. All others-the Mongolians of the Far East and Japan, the American Indians, both North and South, the natives of Australia and New Zealand-were naturally omitted from the list. It may, of course, be argued that all the nations not regarded as descended from Shem and Japheth might be included among the descendants of Ham; but apart from the fact that this would give to Ham far more than his due share of the human race, it would class the Egyptians and Canaanites with the Mongolians, Indians, etc., which seems improbable. "The Table of Nations," in fact, excludes the races of which the Semitic East was in ignorance, and which could not, therefore, be given according to their lands, languages, families, and nations ( Genesis 10:5, 20, 31).

3. Order of the Three Races:

Notwithstanding that the sons of Noah are here ( Genesis 10:1) and elsewhere mentioned in the order Shem, Ham and Japheth ( Genesis 5:32; Genesis 6:10), and Ham was apparently the youngest (see HAM), the Table begins ( Genesis 10:2) with Japheth, enumerates then the descendants of Ham ( Genesis 10:6), and finishes with those of Shem ( Genesis 10:21). This order in all probability indicates the importance of each race in the eyes of the Hebrews, who as Semites were naturally interested most in the descendants of Shem with whom the list ends. This enabled the compiler to continue the enumeration of Shem's descendants in Genesis 11:12 immediately after the verses dealing with the building of the Tower of Babel and the Confusion of Tongues.

4. Extent of Each:

The numbers of the descendants of each son of Noah, however, probably bear witness to the compiler's knowledge, rather than their individual importance in his eyes. Thus, the more remote and less known race of Japheth is credited with 14 descendants only (7 sons and 7 grandsons), while Ham has no less than 29 descendants (4 sons, 23 grandsons, and 2 great-grandsons), and Shem the same (5 sons, 5 grandsons, 1 great-grandson, and 20 remoter descendants to the 6th generation). Many of the descendants of Shem and Ham, however, are just as obscure as the descendants of Japheth. How far the relationship to the individual sons of Noah is to be taken literally is uncertain. The earlier names are undoubtedly those of nations, while afterward we have, possibly, merely tribes, and in chapter 11 the list develops into a genealogical list of individuals.

5. Sons of Japheth:

It is difficult to trace a clear system in the enumeration of the names in the Table. In the immediate descendants of Japheth ( Genesis 10:2), Gomer, Magog, Tubal and Mesech, we have the principal nations of Asia Minor, but Madai stands for the Medes on the extreme East, and Javan (the Ionians) for the Greeks (? and Romans) on the extreme West (unless the Greeks of Asia Minor were meant). Gomer's descendants apparently located themselves northward of this tract, while the sons of Javan extended themselves along the Mediterranean coastlands westward, Tarshish standing, apparently, for Spain, Kittim being the Cyprians, and Rodanim the Rhodians.

6. Sons and Descendants of Ham:

Coming to the immediate descendants of Ham ( Genesis 10:6), the writer begins with those on the South and then goes northward in the following order: Cush or Ethiopia, Mizraim or Egypt, Phut (better Put, the Revised Version (British and American)) by the Red Sea, and lastly Canaan-the Holy Land-afterward occupied by the Israelites. The sons of Cush, which follow ( Genesis 10:7), are apparently nationalities of the Arabian coast, where Egyptian influence was predominant. These, with the sons of Raamah, embrace the interior of Africa as known to the Hebrews, and the Arabian tract as far as Canaan, its extreme northern boundary. The reference to Babylonia (Nimrod) may be regarded as following not unnaturally here, and prominence is given to the district on account of its importance and romantic history from exceedingly early times. Nevertheless, this portion ( Genesis 10:8-12) reads like an interpolation, as it not only records the foundation of the cities of Babylonia, but those of Assyria as well-the country mentioned lower down ( Genesis 10:22) among the children of Shem.

7. Further Descendants of Ham:

The text then goes back to the West again, and enumerates the sons of Mizraim or Egypt ( Genesis 10:13), mostly located on the southeastern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. These include the "Libyans in the narrowest sense" (Lehabim), two districts regarded as Egyptian (Naphtuhim and Pathrusim), the Casluhim from whom came the Philistines, and the Caphtorim, probably not the Cappadocians of the Targums, but the island of Crete, "because such a large island ought not to be wanting" (Dillmann). The more important settlements in the Canaanitish sphere of influence are referred to as the sons of Canaan ( Genesis 10:15)-Sidon, Heth (the Hittites), the Jebusites (who were in occupation of Jerusalem when the Israelites took it), the Amorites (whom Abraham found in Canaan), and others. Among the sons of Canaan are, likewise, the Girgashites, the Arkites and Sinites near Lebanon, the Arvadites of the coast, and the Hamathites, in whose capital, Hamath, many hieroglyphic inscriptions regarded as records of the Hittites or people of Heth have been found. It is possibly to this occupation of more or less outlying positions that the "spreading abroad" of the families of the Canaanites ( Genesis 10:18) refers. In Genesis 10:19 the writer has been careful to indicate "the border of the Canaanites," that being of importance in view of the historical narrative which was to follow; and here he was evidently on familiar ground. 8. Sons of Shem:

In his final section-the nations descended from Shem ( Genesis 10:21)-the compiler again begins with the farthest situated-the Elamites-after which we have Asshur (Assyria), to the Northwest; Arpachshad (? the Chaldeans), to the West; Lud (Lydia), Northwest of Assyria; and Aram (the Aramean states), South of Lud and West of Assyria. The tribes or states mentioned as the sons of Aram (Uz, Hul, Gether and Mash), however, do not give the names with which we are familiar in the Old Testament (Aram Naharaim, Aram Zobah, etc.), and have evidently to be sought in different positions, indicating that they represent an earlier stage of their migrations. With regard to their positions, it has been suggested that Uz lay in the neighborhood of the Hauran and Damascus; Hul near the Sea of Galilee; and that Mash stands for Mons Masius. This last, however, may have been the land of Mas, West of Babylonia.

9. Further Descendants of Shem:

Only one son is attributed to Arpachshad, namely, Shelah (shalach, shelach, Genesis 10:24), unidentified as a nationality. This name should, however, indicate some part of Babylonia, especially if his son, Eber, was the ancestor of the Hebrews, who were apparently migrants from Ur (Mugheir) (see ABRAHAM; UR OF THE CHALDEES). Though Peleg, "in whose days the land was divided," may not have been an important link in the chain, the explanatory phrase needs notice. It may refer to the period when the fertilizing watercourses of Babylonia-the "rivers of Babylon" ( Psalm 137:1)-were first constructed (one of their names was pelegh), or to the time when Babylonia was divided into a number of small states, though this latter seems to be less likely. Alternative renderings for Selah, Eber and Peleg are "sending forth" (Bohlen), "crossing" (the Euphrates), and "separation" (of the Joktanites) (Bohlen), respectively.

The Babylonian geographical fragment 80-6-17, 504 has a group explained as Pulukku, perhaps a modified form of Peleg, followed by (Pulukku) sa ebirti, "Pulukku of the crossing", the last word being from the same root as Eber. This probably indicates a city on one side of the river (? Euphrates), at a fordable point, and a later foundation bearing the same name on the other side.

Reu, Serug, and Nahor, however, are regarded generally as place-names, and Terah as a personal name (the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran). From this point onward the text ( Genesis 11:27) becomes the history of the Israelite nation, beginning with these patriarchs.

10. Value of Table and Its Historical Notes:

Arguments for its early date.-There is hardly any doubt that we have in this ethnographical section of Genesis one of the most valuable records of its kind. Concerning the criticisms upon it which have been made, such things are unavoidable, and must be regarded as quite legitimate, in view of the importance of the subject. The interpolated sections concerning Nimrod and the Tower of Babel are such as would be expected in a record in which the compiler aimed at giving all the information which he could, and which he thought desirable for the complete understanding of his record. It may be regarded as possible that this information was given in view of the connection of Abraham with Babylonia. In his time there were probably larger cities than Babylon, and this would suggest that the building of the Babylonian capital may have been arrested. At the time of the captivity on the other hand, Babylon was the largest capital in then known world, and the reference to its early abandonment would then have conveyed no lesson-seeing the extent of the city, the reader realized that it was only a short setback from which it had suffered, and its effects had long since ceased to be felt.

11. Further Arguments for Early Date of Table:

Limits of its information.-For the early date of the Table also speaks the limited geographical knowledge displayed. Sargon of Agade warred both on the East and the West of Babylonia, but he seems to have made no expeditions to the North, and certainly did not touch either Egypt or Ethiopia. This suggests not only that the information available was later than his time, but also that it was obtained from merchants, travelers, envoys and ambassadors. The scantiness of the information about the North of Europe and Asia, and the absence of any reference to the Middle or the Far East, imply that communications were easiest on the West, the limit of trade in that direction being apparently Spain. If it could be proved that the Phoenicians came as far westward as Britain for their tin, that might fix the latest date of the compilation of the Table, as it must have been written before it became known that their ships went so far; but in that case, the date of their earliest journeys thither would need to be fixed. Noteworthy is the absence of any reference to the Iranians (Aryan Persians) on the East. These, however, may have been included with the Medes (Madai), or one of the unidentified names of the descendants of Japheth in Genesis 10:2, 3.

See SHEM; HAM; JAPHETH, and the other special articles in this Encyclopedia; also, for a great mass of information and theories by many scholars and specialists, Dillmann, Kurzgefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum Altes Testament, "Die Genesis," Leipzig, 1882; W. Max Muller, Asien und Europa, Leipzig, 1893; and F. Hommel, Grundriss der Geographic und Geschichte des alten Orients, Munich, 1904.

T. G. Pinches

SHOWBREAD, TABLE OF

See SHEWBREAD, TABLE OF.

... a table, dining table. Part of Speech: Noun, Feminine Transliteration: trapeza Phonetic
Spelling: (trap'-ed-zah) Short Definition: a table for food or business ...
//strongsnumbers.com/greek2/5132.htm - 7k

4873. sunanakeimai -- to recline with (at table)
... to recline with (at table). Part of Speech: Verb Transliteration: sunanakeimai Phonetic
Spelling: (soon-an-ak'-i-mahee) Short Definition: I recline at table ...
//strongsnumbers.com/greek2/4873.htm - 7k

4411. protoklisia -- the chief place (at the table)
... the chief place (at the table). Part of Speech: Noun, Feminine Transliteration:
protoklisia Phonetic Spelling: (pro-tok-lis-ee'-ah) Short Definition: the chief ...
//strongsnumbers.com/greek2/4411.htm - 6k

4109. plax -- anything flat and broad, hence a flat stone
... table, tablet. From plasso; a moulding-board, ie Flat surface ("plate", or tablet,
literally or figuratively) -- table. see GREEK plasso. ...
//strongsnumbers.com/greek2/4109.htm - 6k

2825. kline -- a small couch
... bed, table. From klino; a couch (for sleep, sickness, sitting or eating) -- bed,
table. see GREEK klino. (klinarion) -- 1 Occurrence. (klinen) -- 4 Occurrences. ...
//strongsnumbers.com/greek2/2825.htm - 6k

4657. skubalon -- refuse
... 4657 (from 2965 , "dog" and 906 , "throw") -- properly, thrown to dogs, like filthy
scraps of garbage ( table-scraps, dung, muck, sweepings); (figuratively ...
//strongsnumbers.com/greek2/4657.htm - 7k

... 7978, 7979. shulchan. 7980 . a table. Transliteration: shulchan Phonetic
Spelling: (shool-khawn') Short Definition: table. Word ...
/hebrew/7979.htm - 6k

1549. gillayon -- a table, tablet
... 1548, 1549. gillayon. 1550 . a table, tablet. Transliteration: gillayon
Phonetic Spelling: (ghil-law-yone') Short Definition: mirrors. ...
/hebrew/1549.htm - 6k

3871. luach -- a tablet, board or plank, a plate
... board, plate, table. Or luach {loo'-akh}; from a primitive root; probably
meaning to glisten; a tablet (as polished), of stone, wood ...
/hebrew/3871.htm - 6k

4580. maog -- a cake
... cake, feast. From uwg; a cake of bread (with la'eg a table- buffoon, ie Parasite) --
cake, feast. see HEBREW uwg. see HEBREW la'eg. 4579, 4580. maog. 4581 ...
/hebrew/4580.htm - 6k

6307. Paddan -- the place where Rachel died
... From an unused root meaning to extend; a plateau; or Paddan param {pad-dan' ar-awm'};
from the same and 'Aram; the table-land of Aram; Paddan or Paddan-Aram, a ...
/hebrew/6307.htm - 6k

... Divine Songs For Children. The TABLE. 1. A General Song of Praise to God.
2 ... viz. The Sluggard. Innocent Play. The End of the Table. ...
//christianbookshelf.org/watts/divine songs for children/the table.htm

... LYRICS REFERENCE TABLE. The Volumes of the Modern Reader's Bible referred
to in the Table are as follows: Wisdom ... REFERENCE TABLE. To ...
/.../various/select masterpieces of biblical literature/reference table.htm

... TABLE OF CONTENTS. Table of Persons Addressed St. Catherine of Siena as seen
in her letters Chief Events in the life of St. Catherine ...
/.../benincasa/letters of catherine benincasa/table of contents.htm

... TABLE OF CONTENTS. AMERICAN LUTHERANISM.....page Introduction.....1-10 EARLY ...
//christianbookshelf.org/bente/american lutheranism/table of contents.htm

... TABLE OF CONTENTS. (Vol. I.). HISTORY OF THE CREEDS OF CHRISTENDOM. FIRST CHAPTER.
ON CREEDS IN GENERAL. PAGE Sec. 1. Name and Definition 3 Sec. ...
/.../creeds of christendom with a history and critical notes/table of contents.htm

... 6. (n.) A view of the contents of a work; a statement of the principal topics discussed;
an index; a syllabus; a synopsis; as, a table of contents. ...
/t/table.htm - 62k

Table-lands (2 Occurrences)
Table-lands. Table-land, Table-lands. Tables . Multi-Version
Concordance Table-lands (2 Occurrences). Deuteronomy 34 ...
/t/table-lands.htm - 7k

Table-land (8 Occurrences)
Table-land. Tableland, Table-land. Table-lands . Noah Webster's Dictionary ...
Multi-Version Concordance Table-land (8 Occurrences). ...
/t/table-land.htm - 9k

Table-vessels (2 Occurrences)
Table-vessels. Tablets, Table-vessels. Tabor . Multi-Version
Concordance Table-vessels (2 Occurrences). Exodus 25:29 ...
/t/table-vessels.htm - 6k

Writing-table (1 Occurrence)
Writing- table. Writings, Writing- table. Writing-tablet .
Multi-Version Concordance Writing- table (1 Occurrence). Luke ...
/w/writing-table.htm - 6k

Showbread (18 Occurrences)
... various phrases used in the Hebrew and Greek to designate the loaves of bread which
the priest of the week placed before the Lord on the golden table in the ...
/s/showbread.htm - 12k

Tableland (8 Occurrences)
... Deuteronomy 3:10 All the towns of the table-land and all Gilead and Bashan as far
as Salecah and Edrei, towns of the kingdom of Og in Bashan. (See RSV). ...
/t/tableland.htm - 8k

Show-bread (15 Occurrences)
... (WBS). Hebrews 9:2 For there was a tabernacle made; the first, in which was the
candlestick, and the table, and the show-bread; which is called the sanctuary. ...
/s/show-bread.htm - 10k

Shewbread (16 Occurrences)
... They were flat and thin, and were placed in two rows of six each on a table in the
holy place before the Lord. ... Standard Bible Encyclopedia. SHEWBREAD, TABLE OF. ...
/s/shewbread.htm - 20k

Lamp-stand (17 Occurrences)
... Hebrews 9:2 for a tabernacle was prepared, the first, in which was both the
lamp-stand, and the table, and the bread of the presence -- which is called 'Holy ...
/l/lamp-stand.htm - 11k
What is the Table of Nations? | GotQuestions.org What was the bread of the Presence (Exodus 25:30)? | GotQuestions.org Why are there two demon-possessed men in the Gerasene tombs in Matthew, but only one in Mark and Luke? | GotQuestions.org Table: Dictionary and Thesaurus | Clyx.com
Bible Concordance * Bible Dictionary * Bible Encyclopedia * Topical Bible * Bible Thesuarus

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Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary 1. ( n.) A smooth, flat surface, like the side of a board; a thin, flat, smooth piece of anything; a slab. 2. ( n.) A thin, flat piece of wood, stone, metal, or other material, on which anything is cut, traced, written, or painted; a tablet 3.

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table

TA'BLE, n. L. tabula.

1. A flat surface of some extent, or a thing that has a flat surface; as a table of marble.

2. An article of furniture, consisting usually of a frame with a surface of boards or of marble, supported by legs, and used for a great variety of purposes, as for holding dishes of meat, for writing on, &c.

The nymph the table spread.

3. Fare or entertainment of provisions; as, he keeps a good table.

4. The persons sitting at table or partaking of entertainment.

I drink to th' general joy of the whole table.

5. A tablet; a surface on which any thing is written or engraved. The ten commandments were written on two tables of stone. Ex.32.

Written--not on tables of stone, but on fleshly tables of the heart. 2 Cor. 3.

6. A picture, or something that exhibits a view of any thing on a flat surface.

Saint Anthony has a table that hangs up to him from a poor peasant.

7. Among Christians, the table, or Lord's table, is the sacrament, or holy communion of the Lord's supper.

8. The altar of burnt-offering. Mal. 1.

9. In architecture, a smooth, simple member or ornament of various forms, most usually in that of a long square.

10. In perspective, a plain surface, supposed to be transparent and perpendicular to the horizon. It is called also perspective plane.

11. In anatomy, a division of the cranium or skull. The cranium is composed of two tables or lamins, with a cellular structure between them, called the meditallium or diploe.

12. In the glass manufacture, a circular sheet of finished glass, usually about four feet in diameter, each weighing from ten to eleven pounds. Twelve of these are called a side or crate of glass.

13. In literature, an index; a collection of heads or principal matters contained in a book, with references to the pages where each may be found; as a table of contents.

14. A synopsis; many particulars brought into one view.

15. The palm of the hand.

Mistress of a fairer table

Hath not history nor fable.

16. Draughts; small pieces of wood shifted on squares.

We are in the world like men playing at tables.

17. In mathematics, tables are systems of numbers calculated to be ready for expediting operations; as a table of logarithms; a multiplication table.

18. Astronomical tables, are computations of the motions, places and other phenomena of the planets, both primary and secondary.

19. In chimistry, a list or catalogue of substances or their properties; as a table of known acids; a table of acidifiable bases; a table of binary combinations; a table of specific gravities.

20. In general, any series of numbers formed on mathematical or other correct principles.

21. A division of the ten commandments; as the first and second tables. The first table comprehends our more immediate duties to God; the second table our more immediate duties to each other.

22. Among jewelers, a table diamond or other precious stone, is one whose upper surface is quite flat, and the sides only cut in angles.

23. A list or catalogue; as a table of stars.

Raised table, in sculpture, an embossment in a frontispiece for an inscription or other ornament, supposed to be the abacus of Vitruvius.

Round Table. Knights of the round table, are a military order instituted by Arthur, the first king of the Britons, A.D. 516.

Twelve Tables, the laws of the Romans, so called probably, because engraved on so many tables.

To turn the tables, to change the condition or fortune of contending parties; a metaphorical expression taken from the vicissitudes of fortune in gaming.

To serve tables, to provide for the poor; or to distribute provisions for their wants. Acts.6.

TA'BLE, v.i. To board; to diet or live at the table of another. Nebuchadnezzar tabled with the beasts.

TA'BLE, v.t. To form into a table or catalogue; as, to table fines. In England, the chirographer tables the fines of every county, and fixes a copy in some open place of the court.

1. To board; to supply with food.

2. To let one piece of timber into another by alternate scores or projections from the middle.

tabled

TA'BLED, pp. Formed into a table.

tables

TA'BLES, n. plu. A board used for backgammon.

tabling

TA'BLING, ppr. Boarding; forming into a table; letting one timber into another by scores.

TA'BLING, n. A forming into tables; a setting down in order.

1. The letting of one timber into another by alternate scores or projections, as in ship-building.

2. In sail-making, a broad hem made on the skirts of sails by turning over the edge of the canvas, and sewing it down.

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TABLE - Definition from the KJV Dictionary

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TA'BLE, n. L. tabula. 1. A flat surface of some extent, or a thing that has a flat surface; as a table of marble. 2. An article of furniture, consisting usually of a frame with a surface of boards or of marble, supported by legs, and used for a great variety of purposes, as for holding dishes of meat, for writing on, &c.

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"The value of a table, like all pieces of furniture, lies in its history. We might make it, but furniture in turn makes us. It shapes us, defines us, and determines our everyday lives."

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Furniture is often overlooked as a mundane feature of the home. But its resonance in our lives is much more profound, writes author Ian Sansom.

Furniture contains numerous traces of what we are and who we are and who we think we are.

Cupboards, for example, contain our past - as well as our regrets and secrets. Keys which fit no locks, pieces of paper with obsolete phone numbers and pin numbers written on them, stray playing cards, inexplicable plastic things and old French francs. Why we keep any of this stuff I do not know, except as something to hand on to our own children, to keep in cupboards of their own - our endless inheritance of waste.

Our wardrobes, meanwhile, suggest who we might have become, and where we might have gone. In 1908 E Nesbit published a story in Blackie's Children's Annual, titled The Aunt and Amabel. In the story, a young girl, Amabel, is punished by her aunt for cutting off the heads of flowers in the greenhouse. Furious, the aunt confines poor Amabel to the spare bedroom, where she discovers a book of railway timetables which list a destination called Whereyouwanttogoto.

"This was odd," writes Nesbit, "but the name of the station from which it started was still more extraordinary, for it was not Euston or Cannon Street or Marylebone. The name of the station was Bigwardrobeinspareroom." And so Amabel embarks on her adventure.

In 1948 CS Lewis wrote to a friend that he was attempting to write a children's book "in the tradition of E Nesbit". The children's book he wrote was, of course, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950, and one of the Nesbit traditions he borrowed was the magic wardrobe. Lewis uses his wardrobe to enter an entirely different realm - his destination is the Celestial City.

Like wardrobes, beds act as transports for the imagination also. Writers in particular love to work on the horizontal. Milton's Paradise Lost was mostly written in bed. As was much of Winston Churchill's history of World War Two. Truman Capote claimed that he couldn't think properly unless he was lying down. He liked to start his day in bed with coffee and then move on to mint tea, to sherry and finally to martinis - his bed was a bar.

Furniture also has an emblematic and symbolic function - think of Van Gogh's famous paintings of two chairs, Gauguin's chair and his own, which vividly represent what he imagined to be the difference between him and his friend. Gauguin's chair is a dark brown-red, with generous curved arm-rests, its seat loaded with books and with a candle set upon it, erect and flickering - an image of warmth, wealth, contentment, learning, potency and power. Van Gogh's chair, on the other hand, is yellow, plain and rickety - it looks very much as though it has been made by someone who could do with a little more practice on their mortise and tenon joints. It is a simple man's chair - a poor man, but an honest man.

All furniture communicates meaning - it's unavoidable. It's what things do. A bed speaks of our inner lives, of the body and the soul. Our cupboards and cabinets imply secrets. Wardrobes suggest our dreams of other worlds. And tables invite company.

There are perhaps more kinds of tables than there are of any other type of furniture - kitchen tables, coffee tables, refectory tables, drafting tables, billiard tables, chess tables, table-tennis tables, communion tables, dressing tables, operating tables, library tables, bedside tables, night tables, and side- and end- and sofa tables.

There are innumerable uses for all these tables, but just one thing that unites them, apart from the obvious fact that they all have flat, horizontal surfaces - they are all gathering places, for both people and things. It is significant that the table is at the centre of religious practices - in Judaism, in the home, in Christianity, at the altar - and our language of course is replete with metaphors using tables as proverbial meeting places and negotiating platforms. We put a deal on the table. We drink someone under the table - and then we turn the tables on them. The table is the place where we interact with others - with family, friends, colleagues, rivals - and enemies.

The value of a table, like all pieces of furniture, lies in its history. We might make it, but furniture in turn makes us. It shapes us, defines us, and determines our everyday lives.

Novelist and academic Ian Sansom's week-long series of The Essay: Furniture: A Personal History of Movable Objects runs from Monday 7 April - Friday 11 April at 22.45 BST on BBC Radio 3.

Is there a piece of furniture which holds particular meaning for you?

Send a picture and tell the story behind the furniture using instructions below.

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The hidden meaning within your furniture

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Furniture is often overlooked as a mundane feature of the home. But its resonance in our lives is much more profound, writes author Ian Sansom. Furniture contains numerous traces of what we are and who we are and who we think we are. Cupboards, for example, contain our past - as well as our regrets and secrets.

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Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968)

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Subtitles are superimposed over images of gerbils and cats in domestic settings ranging from a kitchen table to the screen of a window and the garden beyond. Inserted into the documentation of the banal adventure of a band of gerbils loose in the house is the familiar photograph of the dead Ché Guevara surrounded by uniformed men.

RESOURCES:
This UbuWeb resource is edited by Stephen McLaughlin.

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UbuWeb Film & Video: Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968)

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Subtitles are superimposed over images of gerbils and cats in domestic settings ranging from a kitchen table to the screen of a window and the garden beyond. Inserted into the documentation of the banal adventure of a band of gerbils loose in the house is the familiar photograph of the dead Ché Guevara surrounded by uniformed men.

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The Dining Room

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The Dining Room by A. R. Gurney (Featuring Edge's Jeanne Ruskin)

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The SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT is one of Europe's most renowned exhibition institutions. Here you can find information about exhibitions and events featured by SCHIRN.

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In its 30th year, the Sunday salon at Louise Bourgeois's house in Chelsea is suddenly getting quite famous. If you've got a certain flair with the cold call, work to show and if you can hack the possibility of being reduced to ''a hair in the soup,'' as Louise says, it's a fascinating trip.

Louise Bourgeois, like the giant mother-spider sculpture she created several years ago, has been spinning a web of weirdly magnificent work for more than six decades -- and finally, at 90, she's getting her full due. ''A woman has no place as an artist unless she proves, over and over again, she won't be eliminated,'' she said more than 25 years ago, when a mere girl in her 60's. To meet Louise is to know she won't be eliminated.

In attendance on the Sunday I went: Matthew Riva, 25, painter, poet and great-grandson of Marlene Dietrich; Brent Howard, the welder, who helped put Louise's giant spiders together; Jean-Louis, her son, who is fanning himself with a piece of cardboard with the word ''obsession'' or ''confession'' scrawled on one side; Pouran Esrafily, who is filming us; Robert Storr, the former senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art and Louise's biographer; and six young artists, some extremely good, some less so. A self-described Charles Manson-meets-Yanni look-alike called Cloud sits next to a guy who has brought along a head shot, a television and his girlfriend. Quietly, perhaps cruelly, he's nicknamed Dysfunctional Model. Cliques are forming. We sit in Louise's web, a wonderfully tatty parlor, watching the paint peel, waiting nervously. There is a round coffee table with a dozen bottles of liquor on it. Esrafily pours and says: ''Louder! Like we're having a party. If she thinks she's missing a party, she'll come down.'' Cloud taunts us: ''Man, she's gonna lay waste. I call this place the smack-down shack, 'cause it ends in tears, man.''

Then she appears, and it's hard to imagine this small, opalescent woman in a pink tunic, black slip over black leggings and tiny black Nikes smacking anybody down.

We'll see. Later Louise will tell me: ''I want them to have a good time and drink a lot. They say, 'I want to show you my work,' and what they really mean is, 'I want to be endorsed, and congratulated.'''

First up is Riva. He has brought a large, Rothko-like canvas made with blue gesso and marble dust. Louise tilts the lamp toward it. ''And tell everyone -- you are the grandson of who?'' she asks.

''She's been dead since I was 15,'' Riva says of Great-Granny Dietrich, ''so I should have my name used.''

Louise passes no judgment, but asks the others to assess it, as she often will. The comments are astute, intelligent and competitive. Louise is intrigued by the title, ''When the Echoes Never Ring,'' which leads unexpectedly to a discussion of words, and a volume of ''journal'' poetry in his bag. (Oh no.) ''Read,'' she says. He does. ''Again,'' she says. ''Again.'' Louise's face lifts. The poems are startlingly good, sending a little shiver through the group, save for one -- Dysfunctional Model takes issue with the word ''whence'' and calls Riva pretentious. To show him how it's done, he pulls out a notebook and slavers through a reading of his own verse -- yelping, panting, whispering, acting out all the parts. Yes, well. We carry on.

Others show their work. But this little thundercloud is a gathering storm, which will eventually culminate in the loud and dramatic expulsion of Dysfunctional Model -- head shot, TV, girlfriend and offending ''artwork'' in tow. The bolt of lightning -- a tricked-out rap video of Sept. 11 that he showed us -- wasn't the problem. It was the violent and sustained reaction he had to those who were deeply offended by it. As Robert Storr said, ''An artist cannot stand beside his work and defend it.''

Louise refuses to defend or explain her work. It's part of the glamour and privilege of fame in old age, the tant pis pose that comes with being late for your life. Becoming a cult figure, and a sexual outlaw in your 80's, is probably not the shortest distance to a fashion shoot, but it may be the most compelling: in 1997 she deigned to appear in an advertising campaign for Helmut Lang. ''I enjoy his work, and I enjoy him,'' Louise says.

Lang says: ''It was a real exchange. When we met, I had the feeling of family. Art always explains itself to you personally. What makes her so powerful is she lived everything, and she relives it again and again.'' He is referring to the anguish of childhood trauma and betrayal that repeats in her work. (''The Destruction of the Father'' is the name of one of her best-known installations, and with the exception of the more recent giant spiders, most everything else could take some variation of the same title.)

The artist and the designer have been exchanging wares and ideas for several years, like Schiaparelli and Dali. Louise is working hard these warm summer afternoons on a new piece to surprise her friend with. ''It will emit light, for the window of his shop on Greene Street,'' she tells me. She rummages in her kitchen cupboard and comes up with a wild-and-woolly fake-fur coat that Lang sent her. ''I may look like a bear, when I am not a bear!''

Was the gift inspired by the fabulous monkey-fur coat she wears in her infamous Robert Mapplethorpe portrait -- the one in which she cradles Fillette under her arm Fillette, an enormous phallus she sculptured in plaster and latex like a lovely Fendi baguette? ''Sure,'' Lang says chuckling, ''yes, why not?'' Fillette means ''young girl,'' and she intends it as lightly as she carries it; as an act of tenderness, without irony. ''We had an appointment,'' she recalls of the Mapplethorpe sitting, ''so I took precautions and came with a kind of excuse for coming, and I thought he would still be half-asleep, so I came prepared.'' Helmut Lang ads notwithstanding, the Mapplethorpe portrait is as exhibitionistic as Louise Bourgeois, the person, gets; the shock and sensation is all in her work.

I return the next day with chocolate (Louise adores chocolate). Jerry Gorovoy, her assistant and friend, is there. We watch a kooky black-and-white video of Louise's 1978 performance piece called ''A Banquet: A Fashion Show of Body Parts,'' which was inspired by her sculpture ''Confrontation'' and looks like that lumpy Comme des Garçons collection of several years back.

''Won't you drink something more interesting?'' she asks, replacing my water with Campari neat. The commentary, read fashion-show style by a former Playboy bunny, describes the action while an amusing assortment of real genitals, prosthetic naughty bits and masses of multiple breasts strides by. ''These parts may be human, animal, male, female,'' says the commentator. ''Parts you usually find inside your clothes -- now they are on the outside.'' As the artist Jenny Holzer has said of Louise, ''Her work seems neither male nor female, but both with a vengeance; the meat breeds itself.'' A seductive banquet of indeterminate flesh? A horror of mystery meat?

Smiling and nibbling a madeleine, Louise watches herself, 24 years younger, talking on camera: ''It is a confrontation because they have to face themselves in front of the others and face how limited and uninteresting they are. * We have to come to terms with how short our lives are.'' She is talking about her work, but it applies, as well, to her life. And, as Jerry Gorovoy points out, that is exactly what the Sunday salons at Louise Bourgeois's house are all about.

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In its 30th year, the Sunday salon at Louise Bourgeois's house in Chelsea is suddenly getting quite famous. If you've got a certain flair with the cold call, work to show and if you can hack the possibility of being reduced to ''a hair in the soup,'' as Louise says, it's a fascinating trip.

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Sunday Salons, artists and their kitchen's/kitchen tables

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Alice Waters, chef and co-founder of the famous Californian slow food restaurant Chez Panisse, describes the relationship between cooking and art as follows: "The most literal visceral connection we make is with food... The acts of art-making and cooking align in many ways; both reactive and creative, they mimic and accommodate one another."

So, is there a connection between what happens in artists' studios and what goes on in their kitchens? Amid all the pots and pans, can we find points of references to their work and their personalities? Are artists particularly creative when it comes to the everyday act of cooking? Through photos and inventories of their kitchens, as well as anecdotes relating to their eating habits, we will try to gain an insight into the culinary worlds of some well-known artists.

This time we delve into the cuisine of artist Louise Bourgeois, whose paintings and sculptural object art deal intensively with female identity. Born 1911 in Paris, Bourgeois studied in a number of artist studios in Montparnasse and Montmartre as well as various art schools before moving to New York in 1938. In the 1970s, she began to get involved in the feminist movement and in 1982 was the first female artist to be honored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York with a retrospective of her work. Already at an early age Bourgeois developed a tense relationship to domestic tasks, which in her generation were still considered to be unequivocally "female".

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From Studio to Dining Table: Louise Bourgeois

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Alice Waters, chef and co-founder of the famous Cali­fornian slow food restau­rant Chez Panisse, describes the rela­tion­ship between cooking and art as follows: "The most literal visceral connec­tion we make is with food... The acts of art-making and cooking align in many ways; both reac­tive and creative, they mimic and accom­mo­date one another."

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Semiotics of the Kitchen1975

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Carrie Mae Weems: “The Kitchen Table Series” (SHORT) | Art21

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21’s mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of con…

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Evil 35: Carlin / Owners, 2012Digital video, color, stereo7:56 minutes

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UbuWeb Film & Video: Tony Cokes - Evil 35: Carlin / Owners (2012)

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Cocktail Table1967

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Allan Kaprow. Cocktail Table. 1967 | MoMA

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Allan Kaprow. Cocktail Table. 1967. Multiple of "Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings" by Allan Kaprow, wooden legs, bottle and glass. overall: 28 x 15 x 15 1/4" (71.1 x 38.1 cm, 15 1/4"); component (book): 12 3/4 x 12 3/8 x 2 1/8" (32.4 x 31.4 x 5.4 cm). Original Editions, New York.

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We use cookies to give you the best possible experience. By using our website you agree to our use of cookies.

1. Categories:

2. Furniture Design

3. Architecture

4. British & Irish History

5. Modern History To 20th Century: C 1700 To C 1900

6. 20th Century History: C 1900 To C 2000

7. Social & Cultural History

8. Antique Furniture / Furniture Collecting

Description

This major illustrated study investigates farmhouse and cabin furniture from all over the island of Ireland. It discusses the origins and evolution of useful objects, what materials were used and why, and how furniture made for small spaces, often with renewable elements, was innate and expected. Encompassing three centuries, it illuminates a way of life that has almost vanished. It contributes as much to our knowledge of Ireland's cultural history as to its history of furniture.

This is a is a substantially different book from Irish Country Furniture, 1700-1950, published by Yale UP in 1993 and reprinted several times. The new book now incorporates the findings of a lot of recent research. Nearly all the black and white pictures in the 1993 book are now in colour, or have been changed for the better, and now include different examples (except archive pictures). Many of the author's fieldwork photographs from the late 1980s, have been digitised and will now be published for the first time. The extent has almost doubled; there are an extra 120 illustrations; the main text has been fully updated and revised; there is a new chapter 'Small Furnishings and Utensils' and there is a new Preface by Louis Cullen. Reflecting the considerable addition of new material, the time scale is also broadened to include discussions of objects and interiors up to 2000. It represents extraordinary value.

The book looks at influences such as traditional architecture, shortage of timber, why and how furniture was painted, and the characteristics of designs made by a range of furniture makers. The incorporation of natural materials such as bog oak, turf, driftwood, straw, recycled tyres or packing cases is viewed in terms of use, and durability. Chapters individually examine stools, chairs and then settles in all their ingenious and multi-purpose forms. How dressers were authentically arranged, with displays varying minutely according to time and place, reveal how some had indoor coops to encourage hens to lay through winter. Some people ate communally or slept in outshot beds, in the coldest north-west, all this is illustrated through art as well as surviving objects.
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Product details

Format Hardback | 576 pages

Dimensions 170 x 240 x 40.64mm | 1,723.65g

Publication date 27 Nov 2020

Publisher Cork University Press

Publication City/Country Cork, Ireland

Language English

Illustrations note 440 photograps in colour

ISBN10 1782054057

ISBN13 9781782054054

Bestsellers rank 11,168

Review quote

Claudia Kinmonth's astonishing work of scholarship and preservation records the richness of Irish furniture and furnishings across three centuries - an intimate and powerful expression of domestic life and material culture in a vanishing world;Daniel Carey, MRIA, is Director of the Moore Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies at NUI Galway and Professor of English in the School of English and Creative Arts. He is a Vice-President of the Royal Irish Academy and a board member of the Irish Research Council.
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About Claudia Kinmonth

Claudia Kinmonth is Research Curator (Domestic Life), Ulster Folk Museum and a Visiting Research Fellow, Moore Institute National University Galway. She is the author of Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale UP).
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Irish Country Furniture and Furnishings 1700-2000

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We use cookies to give you the best possible experience. By using our website you agree to our use of cookies. Categories: Furniture Design Architecture British & Irish History Modern History To 20th Century: C 1700 To C 1900 20th Century History: C 1900 To C 2000 Social & Cultural History Antique Furniture / Furniture Collecting This major illustrated study investigates farmhouse and cabin furniture from all over the island of Ireland.

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"The work of Cape Town artist Caryn Scrimgeour is a playfully deceptive and decidedly contemporary take on one of the oldest genres in art history - the still life. Scrimgeour creates intricate birds-eye views of objects scattered on patterned fabrics - the aftermath of strange dinner parties. Her paintings resist the conventional notion that the genre, also known as nature morte (or 'dead nature'), is empty of life. Despite the fact that her tablescapes are reminiscent of seventeenth century Dutch vanitas paintings in their rich colour, technical virtuosity and use of light, instead of warning her audiences of the fleeting nature of life and the dangers of acquisitiveness, Scrimgeour delights in the myriad memories of a life that inanimate objects can contain. There is also a strong sense from the apparently lackadaisical arrangement of plates, glasses and various other things that the paintings are the scene of something that has just happened, only moments ago.

It is a challenge to distinguish between Scrimgeour's memories and our own, between complex allegories and mere loveliness. There is a joy in recognition, and a curiosity provoked by the unfamiliar. We sense that

The beautifully byzantine compositions further obscure understanding. Collections are typically a means of establishing order and creating meaning, but the relationships and hierarchy between Scrimgeour's chosen objects are unclear. The painted objects on a single canvas can be natural (scattered petals) or manufactured (a yo-yo); a combination of valuable (a diamond ring) and worthless (scraps of newspaper). A sense of unnerving disquiet and unease is felt in the incongruity of these unexpected juxtapositions. The distinctions between them force us to interpret and appreciate each thing in a new context, one defined by what surrounds it. Instead of coldly documenting what she sees, determined by an obvious unifying factor, Scrimgeour seeks and encourages new connections.

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ABOUT | Caryn Scrimgeour | Cape Town | Artist

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The work of Cape Town artist Caryn Scrimgeour is a playfully deceptive and decidedly contemporary take on one of the oldest genres in art history - the still life. Scrimgeour creates intricate birds-eye views of objects scattered on patterned fabrics - the aftermath of strange dinner parties

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" Vibrant Matter promises to invigorate ethical and political judgment by attuning us to the material world, to ourselves, in new ways. Bennett wisely encourages us to practice such judgments without the banisters of deadening binaries of subject-object and human-nonhuman. In this way, we are left with an exciting, but daunting challenge of living democratically as and amidst vital matter." - Torrey Shanks, Theory & Event

" Vibrant Matter takes us on a journey through the philosophical tradition of critical vitalism - or, in Bennett's terms, vital materialism - in order to help us recognize the profound yet delightful weirdness of being in a body that only seems to belong to us."
- Natania Meeke and Antónia Szabari, Los Angeles Review of Books

" Vibrant Matter will reward readers by opening many fields of inquiry that require responses. The reconceptualization of the material world that Vibrant Matter represents is a meaningful step in the direction of reformulating many of the debates within environmental philosophy that continue to retain the vestiges of overt dualism and its less obvious manifestation in the subject-object distinction." - Bryan E. Bannon, Environmental Philosophy

"[An] eloquent, carefully reasoned book. . . . With Bennett's keen insights, I believe I can now show students (and others, maybe even some colleagues) that, through the concept, the sensibility, the practice of vibrant materialities, people in all walks of life can see the sense in treating both nature and artifacts 'more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically' (p.18)." - Thomas Princen, Perspectives on Politics

"How elating I found reading Vibrant Matter, with its eloquent vision of an ethics of the nonhuman. Bennett argues for a perceptual style open to the appearance of thing-power: we who study the texts and objects of a remote age can get behind that, I think. Indeed, for those of us for whom time doesn't simply pass into lostness we are already behind it, still feeling the power of history's things, which didn't know they were supposed to be still. " - Jeffrey J. Cohen, In the Middle blog

"Bennett's is one of those books where, on finishing, you want to begin immediately again to experience the excitement and élan vital of eloquent, simple ideas presented in clear, concise and considered prose, wherein the presence of a generous, kind and unpretentious author speaks straight into your understanding. Vibrant Matter is fresh, alert, quiet and potent, a door opening in a stuffy room to let the outside in, which lets it speak so as to embolden us to breathe differently. It will redraw the boundaries of political thought; it's already doing so. Read it." - Mark Jackson, Emotion, Space and Society

"Bennett's proposals are innovative, and while in the end she may raise more questions than she can offer answers to, Vibrant Matter is a text ripe with possibilities. The strength of the work is its careful treatment of nonhumans as vital forces and the numerous examples employed to develop a political ecology of things." - Katherine F. Chandler, Qui Parle

"Orienting us to re-encounter both nature and familiar objects as newly strange and pulsing with 'thing-power,' Bennett challenges our worn assumptions concerning the hierarchy between humans and things, the workings of causality, and our deep cultural attachment to matter and nature as inanimate. . . . Her book is surprising, refreshing, and troubling." - Lori J. Marso, Political Theory

"Overall, I am attracted by the ideas Bennett presents. They lead to new ways of thinking about things and artifacts, and for those of us who are used to think about embodied interaction, user experience, etc. many of the ideas are not that far fetched. I am curious to see how this and similar new philosophical attempts will be translated into more concrete activities and approaches relevant for design. This new evolution of ideas concerned with the status of 'things' and of the material world is highly interesting and with Bennett's work we have another example of why we need it and how it could be used." - Erik Stolterman, Transforming Grounds blog

"What Jane Bennett has delivered is the most precise and compelling account of a more than human politic sand why it matters. Vibrant Matters is the best argument to date of how materiality operates as a vital force, as much more than social construction or brute resistance or recalcitrance. In respecting the stuff of the world, in being attentive to it, Bennett has pushed political philosophy way beyond its comfort zone: something that was long overdue and from which there is no return." - Gay Hawkins, Cultural Studies Review

"For the sake of assuaging harms already inflicted we have always cobbled together publics that deal with vibrant matters of floods, fires, earthquakes and so on. For the sake of preventing unseen future harms, Bennett's book argues that we need to take a closer look at how we are embedded in a web of mutual affect that knows no bounds between living and nonliving, human and nonhuman. It is in this refreshingly naïve 'no-holds-barred' approach that Bennett's work has much to offer for a reconsideration of our role as thinking, speaking humans in a cosmos of vibrant matter that we continually depoliticize even in our efforts to 'protect' and 'save' the earth . . . a highly recommended read." - Stefan Morales, M/C Reviews

" Vibrant Matter is a fascinating, lucid, and powerful book of political theory. By focusing on the 'thing-side of affect,' Jane Bennett seeks to broaden and transform our sense of care in relation to the world of humans, non-human life, and things. She calls us to consider a 'parliament of things' in ways that provoke our democratic imaginations and interrupt our anthropocentric hubris." - Romand Coles, author of Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy

" Vibrant Matter represents the fruits of sustained scholarship of the highest order. As environmental, technological, and biomedical concerns force themselves onto worldly political agendas, the urgency and potency of this analysis must surely inform any rethinking of what political theory is about in the twenty-first century." - Sarah Whatmore, coeditor of The Stuff of Politics: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life

"This manifesto for a new materialism is an invigorating breath of fresh air. Jane Bennett's eloquent tribute to the vitality and volatility of things is just what we need to revive the humanities and to redraw the parameters of political thought." - Rita Felski, author of Uses of Literature

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" Vibrant Matter promises to invigorate ethical and political judgment by attuning us to the material world, to ourselves, in new ways. Bennett wisely encourages us to practice such judgments without the banisters of deadening binaries of subject-object and human-nonhuman. In this way, we are left with an exciting, but daunting challenge of living democratically as and amidst vital matter."

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"With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire..." The quote is from Gustave Flaubert but it is one that Colombian artist Doris Salcedo is very familiar with. After a lifetime of turning our indifferent gaze towards the world's oppressed, she knows all about how hot the flames get and the extent of the damage they wreak. She knows the art works slowly: it is a transmission belt created in the present to warn new generations about the future. Not that she minds. She takes it in her stride. It strengthens her defiance.

Her latest artwork, Fragmentos (Fragments), opened in Bogotá on December 10. It is a museum whose entire floor consists of the melted remains of 37 tons of decommissioned weapons turned over by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, otherwise known as the FARC. It is another milestone in the career of this 60-year-old Colombian, who is the most highly esteemed and widely recognized Latin American artist in the world.

The peace agreement between the Colombian government and the guerilla forces included the creation of three artworks that would keep the conflict that paralyzed development and reconciliation for 70 years from being forgotten. The locations for these pieces would be Havana, where the peace agreement was signed in 2017, New York and Bogotá, the Colombian capital which suffered the bloody consequences of the conflict for years.

Our ignorance is not innocent: we choose not to know

"It's an anti-monument," says Salcedo about her work. "The first thing that occurred to me when they asked me to accept the commission was to say no. I didn't want to work with material that had caused so much pain. I decided I wouldn't do it but I changed my mind. I understood that the problem was the way it was put to me. I didn't think the weapons should be made into a monument. I chucked that notion out. I couldn't construct a hierarchical artwork because we are not looking at a single version of the story."

So Salcedo decided to go for something parallel and horizontal. " Fragments is the floor on which to build a new Colombia and on which to stamp on the weapons. I am aware of the ambiguity - it's what I'm seeking," she says. "If I could, I would melt all the weapons in the world. What I felt when we threw tons of them in the furnace was extremely important. It's what should happen all over the world and Fragments should be an example."

According to the artist, who has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Complutense University of Madrid, she is apprehensive about different aspects of the peace process. "One of them is that Colombian society paid attention to the FARC during the struggle, but since they handed over their weapons, they have been treating them badly and not abiding by the agreements," she says. "It makes me ashamed to see how the politicians allow this. Once they are disarmed, they should be considered Colombians of the first order, not the fifth. Otherwise, resentment, revenge and humiliation come into play."

While Salcedo contemplates the pain of war as an artist, there are of course those in Colombia who experienced it firsthand and, aware of this, Salcedo invited 20 women who were subject to sexual slavery to participate in her project. "The collective has shaped the character of the work," she says. "The response of these women was what I was hoping for. They felt they were helping to shape Colombian history. That's how they talked about it. We're speaking about extremely poor, marginalized women."

In spite of her conversations with the victims, Salcedo says there is something she still does not understand. "I can't get my head around the rape and abuse." But this doesn't frustrate her: "Art is just a way of failing better, if we are to quote Samuel Beckett. There are no triumphs - just ways of asking questions and picking at the threads to get a better understanding of reality."

Eventually, Salcedo gave up putting herself in the skin of the aggressor, with all their irrational drive and senseless acts. "We can't give it a meaning, which is why it is so dangerous," she says.

She did, however, understand that the level of violence toward the victims is something that happens all around us on a daily basis, only we often choose not to see it. "Our ignorance is not innocent: we choose not to know instead of taking the lid off the rotting food in the pot."

Involving the women was a way of flagging up these issues. "It's showing how they manage in the most extraordinary way to keep going from day to day. Just sleeping at night is a huge achievement for them. Having breakfast without a panic attack, as well. Getting through the day and producing something is a feat. I wanted to shine some light on this blind spot."

Besides Fragments, Salcedo has created other works inspired by the conflict, such as a simple reconstructed table called Tabula rasa. "I could see that I needed to break it up and put it back together again. It's a metaphor for these women who have been murdered," she says.

Salcedo typically works slowly, but Fragments required a different pace. In less than a year, she chose the space together with architect Carlos Granada, completed the design concept and got it done. The museum is located in a discreet street close to the presidential palace where a crumbling adobe building provides the diaphanous spaces, and where the ruins contrast starkly with the floor of melted weapons.

We've destroyed 37 tons of weapons through dialogue. We are capable of this. We don't have to kill each other

Salcedo's team of 30 worked relentlessly here alongside the 20 female victims of the conflict, each with a unique story of their own. "We should see how many versions we can come up with on the recent past," she says. "We are dealing with a story that lacks balance, and that is the element that grew and generated more conflict. It dragged it out and made it more radical and filled with hatred. Colombia fell into the logic of the Cold War and a liberal guerilla army became a bastion of communism. It became more extreme, as did the army, and the distance grew between them until it became impossible for them to find each other."

There were, says Salcedo, many factors at play. "Classism, racism, Colombian sexism; the struggles that generate marginalization," she says. "Everyone rebelled against the center. Society starts excluding others and those who are deprived will always come back and take revenge. This is what fuels the conflict. The humanity of the other is not accepted."

Salcedo believes that it is important now to focus on building peace. "There's a risk it will break down," she says, "but we've set a precedent. We've destroyed 37 tons of weapons through dialogue and we mustn't forget that. We are capable of this. We don't have to kill each other."

Fragments could, however, cause its own share of controversy. "The FARC does not like the concept of Fragments," says the artist. "They don't want people to stand and contemplate their weapons, or explore their involvement in sexual violence. But our work is not to blame, it's a forum that aims to encourage dialogue."

Now that Fragments is finished, Doris is continuing with her mission, which is the constant examination of the pain and grief that has inspired her art over the years. "Mourning can only be conceived of within the context of armed conflict," she says. "Natural death inspires something beautiful. It's based on an element of comfort, it makes us human and gives us the chance to stop a person from disappearing. But what I am working on is the imposed death, the one that results from political violence that destroys life."

Other artworks created by Salcedo have made a huge impact on the world, such as Shibboleth, an installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, which consisted of a long crack in the floor. It was an allegory for racism, installed in a modern building that was constructed with money that has its origins in slavery.

"I thought I would bring who I am [to the commission]," says Salcedo. "And when I got there, to the museum of a slave owner who made his fortune from the plantations in Jamaica, I saw this crack. And something perverse and marvelous occurred to me that led to pointing out how this same building had been put up on the back of racism."

Those running the Tate were divided on the issue and there was talk of dropping the commission, but in the end it went ahead and today the scar from the crack in the Turbine Hall can still be seen. "I had to break the museum," says Salcedo. "It was necessary in order to show the wound and force them to look at the ground because we're under it - the repressed - in the cultural heart of Europe."

Artists should get involved in what they see and in its consequences

Salcedo did the same in the summer of 2017 in Madrid. When she won the Velázquez Prize in 2010, the Reina Sofia Museum commissioned an artwork. Again making a direct connection between the country of exhibition and the work itself, she turned her gaze on the Straits of Gibraltar, the stage for racism, inequality, abuse, anonymous deaths and the resulting grief. Out of this, she created Palimpsesto for the migrants who cross the Mediterranean in search of a better life. The names of hundreds of victims emerge momentarily on the surface of the work written in watery letters before disappearing again.

Her latest mission has taken her to Pennsylvania, where she has been working on a project inspired by the children who have been separated from their parents for attempting to come into the US over the Mexican border. "It's the worst thing that has happened in the world since the separation of families in the Holocaust," she says.

The recurrent themes of her work fill Salcedo with positive energy. "I feel as though I am on a mission," she says. "There is so much scope, things to be done responsibly, starkly and with love. There is a lot to tell as a poetic and philosophical reflection because human beings are complex. Art should be layered and go beyond the original information to connect it to those contemplating it."

Nihilism doesn't come into it. "Art has the ability to act slowly. It lingers for centuries. I don't get down. On the contrary, I feel the need to work more. I feel responsible in a country where violence comes at an unprecedented speed, though I haven't experienced it directly. Artists should get involved in what they see and in its consequences. You can't make the experience of the Holocaust end when the survivors die. The memory has to be kept alive."

But that is not to say that Sacedo is not affected by the themes she works on. "There's no way of avoiding it," she says. "I have spent 30 years immersed in grief and surviving it. You can't get out of the tunnel but you find heroes on the way, those that suffer cast light. They reaffirm life, these important, courageous beings who have so much to teach us. I can't complain because nothing has happened to me. I just relate their stories dutifully. I listen and I try to be faithful to what I am told. Rather than a weight on my shoulders, don't you think that is a gift?"

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Doris Salcedo, the Colombian artist who melted 37 tons of FARC weapons

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"With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire..." The quote is from Gustave Flaubert but it is one that Colombian artist Doris Salcedo is very familiar with. After a lifetime of turning our indifferent gaze towards the world's oppressed, she knows all about how hot the flames get and the extent of the damage they wreak.

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Unland: audible in the mouthis one of a group of three sculptures collectively titled Unland that Salcedo created in 1995-8. The works are a response to the testimonies of children who witnessed their parents' murder during Colombia's civil war. As part of the process of creating the Unland works, the artist travelled to a northern region of the country to research the experiences of these orphans and the ways their lives developed as a result of their trauma. Unland: the orphan's tunic, 1997 (Funcació 'la Caixa' Barcelona), Unland: irreversible witness, 1995-8 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and Unland: audible in the mouth (the last and most minimal of the series) were all made by fusing two old wooden tables into one. Salcedo bought the pine and oak tables she used to make Unland: audible in the mouth in Bogotá, where she lives and works. The two tables have been joined by sawing off the legs at one end of each table and fitting the legless ends together. The artist and her assistants drilled thousands of tiny holes into the tables' surfaces before a team of volunteers laboriously threaded a combination of human hair and split silk fibres through the holes to cover much of the wood. The 'stitching' crosses the hybrid table against the length of the grain, and varies in density and colour. Salcedo used black and dark brown Colombian women's hair she sourced from a local hairdresser and raw white silk. The silk threads are most dense at the end of the pine table, where they also encircle the legs and cover the sides; the ratio of silk to hair gradually decreases towards the central join where hair then supersedes silk on the wider oak table. Deep cuts scored lengthways into the table tops as part of the stitching process evoke controlled wounding, very different from the shallow grooves and notches scratched into the wood during its life as a table in a home. The surface of fine thread and hairs that cover much of the wooden surface recalls the veil of cobwebs that appears in abandoned places and on objects not touched for a long time.

Salcedo studied art and art history at Bogotá University (BFA 1980) where she majored in painting and theatre and was particularly inspired by her teacher, the painter Beatriz Gonzalez (born 1938). She began making sculpture in New York in the early 1980s, while attending New York University (MA 1984). Here she encountered the work of Joseph Beuys (1921-86), whose notion of 'social sculpture' - integrating political awareness with making - and his focus on materials to convey specific meanings were a significant influence on her. She began to think of sculpture as 'a crossroad, a meeting point' (quoted in Basualdo, p.11), of ideology, theory, materials and objects. In New York, Saldedo also experienced being a displaced outsider - a sense she retained on her return to Bogotá in 1985, where she deliberately maintained her peripheral position in order to have a critical distance on Colombian society.

Since the mid 1980s, Salcedo has based her work on the experiences of Colombian people whose lives have been damaged by the country's civil war. During the 1990s, the artist interviewed the relatives of dead and missing people and did extensive research into the records of humanitarian workers. From these stories she created sculptures that poetically resonate with the affects of loss and horror resulting from the trauma of extreme violence. Salcedo invented the title Unland to express the conditions of dispossession and displacement created by war. In Colombia most of those suffering these conditions are in the most distant rural areas of the country and have no voice and no presence to make their suffering known. The word 'un-land' suggests a reversal of some kind - a place that is no longer a place, a country that no longer exists. 'Un-land' evokes the impossibility to imagine or to express the trauma suffered by children who see their parents die violently and whose lives are irrevocably damaged by this experience. The phrase 'audible in the mouth' is derived from a poem by the German-speaking Jewish Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920-70), whose writing was driven by the Holocaust in which his parents perished. To express horrors for which there were no words, Celan invented hybrid and fragmented words or forms of language, ultimately inspiring Salcedo to do the same. The phrase 'audible in the mouth', taken from Celan's poem An Eye, Open, first published in a collection entitled Sprachgitter or Language Mesh (1959), evokes words that cannot be taken into the body in the normal way - through the ears - but rather through the rather more visceral channel of the mouth. The 'audible' words, like the victims and their stories, are displaced to a place where a different kind of hearing occurs - a non-verbal gut-impacting expression of permanent emotional damage to which Salcedo's Unland sculptures attempt to give visible form. They transform the neutral association of tables - around which a family might sit to share a meal - to the disturbing notion of a prop on which a body might be fixed to be tortured or a dead body might be cut open. The intense and pointless labour of stitching wood with hair and silk suggests an attempt to repair the irreparable affective damage of war.

Further reading:
Tanya Barson, '"Unland" The Place of Testimony, Doris Salcedo's Unland: audible in the mouth 1998', Contemporary Art in Focus, Patrons' Paper 3, January 2004, London, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/unland_paper.htm.
Carlos Basualdo, Nancy Princenthal and Andreas Huyssen, Doris Salcedo, London 2000, pp.21, 25, reproduced pp.135, 136 and 138-9 in colour.
Unland: Doris Salcedo: New Work, exhibition brochure, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1999, reproduced [p.4].

Elizabeth Manchester
December 2007

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'Unland: audible in the mouth', Doris Salcedo, 1998 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Unland: audible in the mouth', Doris Salcedo, 1998 Over a period of three years, Salcedo traveled to the northern heartland of Colombia's civil war and spoke to children who had witnessed the murder of their parents. These testimonies inspired a series of three sculptures given the collective title Unland.

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(silent prayer)

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Plegaria Muda, which translates loosely to "silent prayer," began with Salcedo's research into gang violence in Los Angeles. The artist noted how victims and perpetrators of gang violence often share socioeconomic circumstances that lead to conditions of increased violence. They are often viewed as lesser in the eyes of broader society, resulting in a lack of empathy for the loss of their individual lives. The work was also made in response to Salcedo's experience of mass graves that she visited with grieving mothers in Colombia, who were searching for their missing sons.

Each sculpture is composed of two hand-crafted tables, which approximate the size and shape of a human coffin. One table is inverted upon the other, with live grass growing from an earthlike layer in between. The installation counters the anonymity of victims in mass graves with hand-wrought, unique works, and asserts the importance of each individual's proper burial-whether in the United States, Colombia, or elsewhere. For Salcedo, the individual blades of grass evoke a sense of optimism: "I hope that, in spite of everything, life might prevail, even in difficult conditions . . . as it does in Plegaria Muda."

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Plegaria Muda, which translates loosely to "silent prayer," began with Salcedo's research into gang violence in Los Angeles. The artist noted how victims and perpetrators of gang violence often share socioeconomic circumstances that lead to conditions of increased violence.

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Kimsooja: Archive of Mind

Installation at Peabody Essex Museum, USA

* click images to view larger

(Left to right:)

01 - 06: Archive of Mind, 2019, site-specific participatory consisting of clay balls, elliptical wooden table, and sound performance Unfolding Sphere, 2006; installation at Peabody Essex Museum, photos by Bob Packert (1, 6) and Ken Sawyer (2, 3, 4, 5), Courtesy of Kimsooja Studio

© 1983-2019 kimsooja

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kimsooja.com | Kimsooja: To Breathe - Zone of Zero at CAC Malaga

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Kimsooja: Archive of Mind Installation at Peabody Essex Museum, USA * click images to view larger (Left to right:) 01 - 06: Archive of Mind, 2019, site-specific participatory consisting of clay balls, elliptical wooden table, and sound performance Unfolding Sphere, 2006; installation at Peabody Essex Museum, photos by Bob Packert (1, 6) and Ken Sawyer (2, 3, 4, 5), Courtesy of Kimsooja Studio © 1983-2019 kimsooja

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Kimsooja at PROPORTIO, Palazzo Fortuni, Venice

PROPORTIO, Axel and May Vervoordt Foundation, Palazzo Fortuni, Venice
May 9 - November 22, 2015

The exhibition PROPORTIO examines the role that proportion plays in our lives and the complex universe in which we live. By examining wide-ranging and diverse representations found in art, nature, physics, economics, history, science, music, medicine, and many other subjects, the study of proportion uncovers the natural patterns that are used to create everything in the material world.
Proportion is not only a question of numbers. Nor is it a simple comparison of measurements and dimensions in relation to a whole. According to Plato, the definition of proportion is the transition from duality to unity. It's the investigation of how elements and patterns are connected and interconnected across disciplines. It's the investigation of how we, as humans, perceive those patterns through our senses, as well as through our intuition. It's also an exploration of how universal proportions guide our understanding of creation and the dynamic dance between order and chaos.

Throughout the course of known human history, the knowledge of proportions and sacred geometry in particular, has been applied across many civilizations for thousands of years. The sophisticated knowledge of sacred geometry, especially the golden ratio, was considered highly advanced and closely related to secretive spiritual wisdom and religious traditions. As a result, its use was controlled, because it was thought that it's misuse might have undesirable consequences. In the Western world, the knowledge of sacred geometry was so secret that it was intentionally guarded for hundreds of years and may have been purposefully forgotten or discarded.

What was known? How was this knowledge used in the past? How can it help us to understand the world around us today? As an exhibition, the aim of PROPORTIO is to re-start a contemporary dialogue surrounding the lost knowledge of proportions and sacred geometry.

PROPORTIO features specially commissioned artworks by contemporary artists, 20th century masterpieces, Old Master paintings, archaeological artefacts, as well as architectural models and a large library of historical books on proportions. All these works provide a lens to help us see what proportion can teach us about the essential design of the present and how we can use this knowledge to create a blueprint for the future. This exhibition is an opportunity to explore universal proportions and an invitation to reflect upon the interconnectedness of our universe.

LIST OF PARTICIPATING ARTIST
Marina Abramovic, Carla Accardi, Josef Albers, Carl Andre, Rodolfo Aricò, Ida Barbarigo, Massimo Bartolini, Domenico Bianchi, Cristiano Bianchin, Alberto Biasi, Bae Bien-U, Alighiero Boetti, Otto Boll, Agostino Bonalumi, Michaël Borremans, Sandro Botticelli, Lucia Bru, Markus Brunetti, Jean-Marie Bytebier, Pierpaolo Calzolari, Francesco Candeloro, Antonio Canova, Vincenzo Castella, Eduardo Chillida, Chang-Sup Chung, Niccolò Codazzi, Viviano Codazzi, Gianni Colombo, Dadamaino, Hanne Darboven, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Raoul De Keyser, Riccardo De Marchi, Marta Dell'Angelo, Gabriele Devecchi, Maurizio Donzelli, Jan Dries, Arthur Duff, Luciano Fabro, Philippe Favier, Giorgia Fiorio, Henri Foucault, Anne-Karin Furunes, Alberto Giacometti, Ando Gilardi, Fernanda Gomes, Antony Gormley, Kees Goudzwaard, Gotthard Graubner, Aldo Grazzi, Franco Guerzoni, Chong Hyun Ha, Erwin Heerich, Michael Heizer, Samantha Holmes, Sadaharu Horio, Akiko Horio, Ryoji Ikeda, Norio Imai, Robert Indiana, Ann Veronica Janssens, Francesco Jodice, Ilya et Emilia Kabakov, Anish Kapoor, Ellsworth Kelly, William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, Kimsooja, Harry Kivijärvi, Susan Kleinberg, Wolfgang Laib, Edoardo Landi, Le Corbusier, Sol Lewitt, Richard Long, Nino Longobardi, Heinz Mack, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Christian Megert, Richard Meier, Fausto Melotti, Marisa Merz, Mario Merz, Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio Morandi, François Morellet, Shuji Mukai, Rei Naito, Yuko Nasaka, Shirin Neshat, Louise Nevelson, Ben Nicholson, Renato Nicolodi, Mario Nigro, Gioberto Noro, Hans Op de Beeck, Marie Orensanz, Mimmo Paladino, Pablo Palazuelo, Izhar Patkin, Masaomi Raku, Kurt Ralske, Robert Ryman, Lucio Saffaro, Fred Sandback, Giuseppe Santomaso, Tomás Saraceno, MariaTeresa Sartori, Stéphane Sautour, Nobuo Sekine, Conrad Shawcross, Yasuhiro Shimakawa, Kazuo Shiraga, Gabriel Sierra, David Simpson, Bosco Sodi, Ettore Spalletti, Dominique Stroobant, Takis, Antoni Tàpies, Marco Tirelli, Gunther Uecker, Camiel Van Breedam, Koen Van den Broek, Dom Hans Van der Laan, Koen Vanmechelen, Grazia Varisco, Victor Vasarely, Jef Verheyen, Nanda Vigo, Bill Viola, Rachel Whiteread, Maaria Wirkkala, Hyong-Keun Yun, Gianfranco Zappettini and Raphaël Zarka.

Axel and May Vervoordt Foundation

Kimsooja - Thread Routes, Chapter III, Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium

Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium
April 30 - June 13, 2015

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to announce Kimsooja's first exhibition in our gallery in Antwerp presenting her most recent film and installation Thread Routes - Chapter III. This film and installation will make its Belgium premiere. The screening will be accompanied for the first time with a new experimental video that depicts the lightwaves of the film, as well as an installation of Indian block printing-table covers that the artist collected for this exhibition.

Thread Routes: Chapter lll (2010) is the third installment of the six-chapter film series produced by multidisciplinary conceptual artist Kimsooja (°1957, Daegu, Korea). The films were shot in different continents and reveal the artist gazing at the intimate link between each region's textile culture and its people, gender relations, architecture, nature and agriculture. These non-narrative films invite the viewer into a realm that explores the boundaries of poetry and visual anthropology.

Thread Routes: Chapter lll was filmed in India in 2012. It features traditional dyeing, knitting, embroidery, block printing, and tattooing; the archeological sites and the temporary dwellings belonging to nomadic communities in the state of Gujarat; as well as two landmarks of Indian architecture: the Queen's Stepwell and the Modhera Sun Temple, near the city of Ahmedabad.

For this exhibition at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Kimsooja has collected the under layers of the block print tables where Indian workers have repeatedly stamped patterns of indigo ink. These textiles bear the marks of repetitive labor and their patterns exposing an intricate layer of ink that ties to the artist's early experiments with painting. The intimate relationship between these acts of labor and the patterns of the fabrics parallels the carved stones of archeological sites filmed in Thread Routes- Chapter lll, and also recall Kimsooja's previous laundry installations and film-work shot in Mumbai called "Mumbai: A Laundery Field." The sound track of the film's protagonists in the act of printing and stamping echoes throughout the installation, where the light data of the film is digitally woven in a new experimental video piece composed of spectral lightwaves.

Thread Routes reveals how the artist gazes at the world: unfolding visual patterns that intimately tie humans to their land. Kimsooja investigates questions relating to the human condition such as nomadism, migration, interpersonal relationships, and women's role in society. She also engages her audience with a reflection on the relations of aesthetics and global politics through a system of beliefs that defies mobility and the act of making. All these themes are present in her multidisciplinary art practice, which includes performance, video, photography, drawing, sculpture, and site-specific installations, that are all linked towards their relational use of light and sound.

Axel Vervoordt Gallery

Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain
Curated by Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya
March 12 - July 12, 2015

From March 12 through July 12, 2015, Kimsooja's Thread Routes will make its Spanish premiere at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, becoming the fourth installation showcased in the Museum's Film & Video gallery. The gallery opened in 2014 and is dedicated to video art, video installation, and the moving image.

Thread Routes (2010-) is a 16-mm film series produced by multidisciplinary conceptual artist Kimsooja (b. 1957, Daegu, Korea). This six chapter project functions as an epic poem that closely contemplates the handiwork of weavers as the seminal structure of all that is labored, built, imagined and witnessed through the artist's silent gaze. The three chapters from the series showing at Guggenheim Bilbao were shot on three different continents and reveal the artist's fascination with the unfolding of space, the piercing gesture of the weaving hands as the genesis of agriculture, architecture and gender relations. These non-narrative films invite the viewer into a realm of poetry and visual anthropology, and carry out Kimsooja's earlier meditations on sewing and wrapping.

A site-specific triangular installation was created by the artist for the Guggenheim Bilbao, and will feature the first three chapters of the six-chapter-long series, filmed in Peru, Europe, and India, respectively. The first film, shot in 2010, follows weavers from the Sacred Valley of the Incas in the Peruvian Andes to the villages of Taquile Island, and quietly unfolds the immensity of the mountainous land as a possible man-made patchwork. The second chapter, filmed in 2011, focuses on the handcrafting of bobbin lace in Bruges, Belgium; Lepoglava, Pag and Hvar, Croatia; Burano, Italy; as well as the industrial lace production in Calais, a town in northern France. These images of European lacemakers are paralleled to architectural structures such as the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic; the Eiffel Tower in Paris; the Milan Cathedral; and the Alhambra in Granada, with its Islamic geometric motifs. The third chapter was filmed in India in 2012 and features traditional dyeing, knitting, embroidery, block printing, and tattooing, intercut with images of archeological sites and the temporary dwellings belonging to nomadic communities in the state of Gujarat; as well as two landmarks of Indian architecture: the Queen's Stepwell and the Modhera Sun Temple, near the city of Ahmedabad.

Thread Routes reveals how the artist gazes at the world: unfolding patterns that intimately tie humans to their land. The series' remaining three chapters will feature the Miao, Tong, and Yi minorities in China, and the native tribes of North America and Northern Africa.

Kimsooja for the last thirty years has investigated questions relating to exile and migration, interpersonal relationships within a global network, and women's role in society. She also engages her audience through a body of performances that defies mobility and the act of making. All these themes are present in her multidisciplinary art practice, which includes performance, video, photography, drawing, sculpture, and site-specific installations, that are all linked through their relational use of light and sound.

Thread Routes stands as the artist's ultimate worldview. One that unites anthropology and animism, human and non-human forms, and brings a highly attentive gaze to the manifold that inhabits the movement of all that ties and animates the fabric of our world.

View More Installation Images Here

Guggenheim Bilbao

Sala Orive, Cordoba, Spain
Curated by Oliva Maria Rubio
March 14 - May 17, 2015

In the video installation Earth-Water-Fire-Air, 2009-2010, Kimsooja addresses four elements, used by various philosophers since ancient times, the last designated entities that constitute the material reality, both Western and Eastern tradition: earth, water, fire, air, as a source of energy and life. Always linked to a symbolic, these four elements, dating from the time of the Presocratics, receiving its most precise formulation Empedocles, persist through the Middle Ages to the Modern Era, profoundly influencing culture and European thought . Also coincide with the Indian and Japanese traditions, which, as did Aristotle added a fifth element, ether (or continent cosmos), and the Buddhist tradition. In some Asian countries such as Korea or China, wind replaces the air.

The six videos that make up the installation, which are titled Fuego de Tierra / Fire of Earth, Agua de Tierra / Water of Earth, Fuego de Aire / Fire of Air, Tierra de Agua / Earth of Water, Aire de Fuego / Air of Fire, and Aire de Tierra / Air of Earth, were filmed on the island of Lanzarote in 2009. In nature and oceanic volcanic island, the artist has found strength and inspiration from these elements, the energy that is: elements of life, we depend on all living beings, but also invitation to fantasy, source of activity creator. Kimsooja makes us see fire in the water, land on water, wind in the water and therefore also the opposite: water in the wind, water in the soil, water on the fire. In a way, as the artist says, the water would suffice to represent the four elements even though you might think that each of these elements only supports a single and separate representation.

The exhibition is complemented by a series entitled The Sun Unfolded, 2008, a set of 6 photographs in which the sun displays the color spectrum light rays extending in concentric waves around.

Cordoba

La Fabrica

Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence, International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, Geneva, Switzerland

International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, Geneva, Switzerland
April 15, 2015 - January 3, 2016

Nonviolence immediately calls to mind a face, a smile, an easily recognizable figure: Mahatma Gandhi.

In 1927 Gandhi published an autobiography entitled "My experiments with truth." The title refers to satyagraha, the "force of truth," the cornerstone of civil disobedience that he championed and exemplified throughout his life. A milestone of nonviolent thought and action, Gandhi's life story was the natural choice for the guiding principle and title of an exhibition on the art of nonviolence.

Gandhi's personal, spiritual, ethical and political journey is illustrated in its entire complexity through a large number of documents, which include a remarkable series of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson. The exhibition also reveals, however, the extent of his legacy: Experiments with Truth presents nonviolence as a powerful inspirational force in the visual arts. With around one hundred items on display, the exhibition initiates a dialogue between cultures, the arts and techniques: tantric paintings, Koran parchments, Jain sculptures, Byzantine icons. Contemporary artists such as Marlene Dumas, Dan Flavin, Amar Kanwar, Kimsooja, Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ai Weiwei also take up the messages of nonviolence.

Experiments with Truth. Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence is organized by The Menil Collection, Houston.

The Menil Collection

International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum

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Kimsooja | Current and Upcoming Exhibitions

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Kimsooja at PROPORTIO, Palazzo Fortuni, Venice PROPORTIO, Axel and May Vervoordt Foundation, Palazzo Fortuni, Venice May 9 - November 22, 2015 The exhibition PROPORTIO examines the role that proportion plays in our lives and the complex universe in which we live.

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Lucy + Jorge Orta's work is situated at the intersection of performance art and object-making, where symbol conflates with tool and relational aesthetics merges with physical forms. Their earliest concerns continue into the present, with additional issues layered over initial areas of investigation, resulting in a rich harmonic practice that addresses the conditions that define our existence-the availability of food and clean water, the sustainability of the biosphere, and the extension of basic human rights across the globe. Lucy recently wrote, "How can art practice pave a new role, faced with the growing problems in this world? How can it erase the contradictions between formal aesthetics and social function? How can works of art empower and nurture constructive dialogue? What contribution can we as artists make to human and environmental sustainability?" ...see the entire article in the print version of July/August's Sculpture magazine.

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Art at the Table: Lucy & Jorge Orta - Sculpture

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Lucy + Jorge Orta's work is situated at the intersection of performance art and object-making, where symbol conflates with tool and relational aesthetics merges with physical forms. Their earliest concerns continue into the present, with additional issues layered over initial areas of investigation, resulting in a rich harmonic practice that addresses the conditions that define our existence-the availability of food and clean water, the sustainability of the biosphere, and the extension of basic human rights across the globe.

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Questions about how humans conceive of time underpinned Japanese artist Yuki Kimura's CCA Wattis exhibition, her first solo show in the United States. The longwinded title, "Inhuman Transformation of New Year's Decoration, Obsolete Conception or 2," belied the sparse installation, which consisted of four artworks given ample breathing room in the large venue, a converted garage. The front space was occupied by Table Stella (2016): six tables arranged in three pairs, from large to small, whose tops each bear a constellation of vintage ashtrays and the same photographic image of a hospital room. The remaining three works were shown in the back of the venue. Table Matematica (2016) is a table whose glossy black surface supports a dizzying arrangement of Jägermeister bottles of different sizes. Mirrors (2016) is a pair of full-length mirrors that leaned against one wall, reflecting the gallery and echoing, in shape and dimension, the final work, which hung on the opposite wall: Division and Revision #2 (2016), consisting of two large-scale prints of a photograph of a three-tiered stand flaunting sundry liquor bottles.

The four artworks are somewhat mystifying. However, the repetition of formal and symbolic elements such as liquor bottles, photographic multiples, and reflective surfaces hints at a cohesive, organizing principle. An informative essay by curator Jeanne Gerrity in the accompanying booklet is interspersed with excerpts from Bergsonism (1966), Gilles Deleuze's book on French philosopher Henri Bergson. Both Bergson and Deleuze offer radical understandings of human consciousness, time, and memory. In one passage Deleuze writes, "The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist."

Kimura's use of found photographs in Division and Revision #2 and Table Stella is the most accessible treatment of the notion of a coexistent past and present, and furthers her investigations into the sculptural aspects of photography. Each work takes as its starting point prints developed from the same negative. When photos are printed at large size, subtle distinctions between them become visible: they are not multiples but unique. By focusing on the materiality and uniqueness of her images, Kimura destabilizes the notion that a photograph serves to represent a subject at a single moment in the past.

Without the curatorial text, one might have had difficulty divining Kimura's association of the twinned images with the Japanese New Year's decoration kagami mochi. These"mirror rice cakes" consist of two stacked rice balls meant to represent the past year and the present one. As Deleuze proposed, the present does not replace the past but becomes part of it.

Kimura anchors these metaphysical wanderings with allusions to the human experience of time: the body's inexorable decay. The hospital-room photo on the tables in Table Stella contrasts a box of pink examination gloves with the traces of someone's attempt to decorate with tchotchkes and trinkets. With the evocation of illness, the ashtrays sitting on the tabletops become timekeeping devices of sorts, like symbols in a vanitas.

The entire exhibition, according to the curatorial text, "acts as a New Year's decoration." If the artworks in the show are ornaments, one need not necessarily do anything further than enjoy their aesthetics. However, the show was ultimately Janus-faced, pitting renewal, celebration, and human intervention as the flip sides of death. At the very least, it will have led viewers to contemplate the metaphors we invent to represent time.

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Questions about how humans conceive of time underpinned Japanese artist Yuki Kimura's CCA Wattis exhibition, her first solo show in the United States. The longwinded title, "Inhuman Transformation of New Year's Decoration, Obsolete Conception or 2," belied the sparse installation, which consisted of four artworks given ample breathing room in the large venue, a converted garage.

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from here i saw what happened and i cried

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Designed and developed by Lisa Goodlin Design

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Welcome to the official website of artist Carrie Mae Weems

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Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series established her as one of the leading artists of her generation. The series, consisting of 20 carefully staged photographs depicting Weems herself sitting at a kitchen table under a lamp, remains one of the key pieces of late 20th- and early 21st-century art. Weems's powerful meditation on domesticity and relationships tells the story of one woman's life as seen through the intimate space of the kitchen, the traditional sphere of women. A recent acquisition made possible by Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund, as well as the Collectors Committee, this significant early work is on view in conjunction with Posing for the Camera: Gifts from Robert B. Menschel.

Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Passes: Admission is always free and passes are not required

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Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series established her as one of the leading artists of her generation. The series, consisting of 20 carefully staged photographs depicting Weems herself sitting at a kitchen table under a lamp, remains one of the key pieces of late 20th- and early 21st-century art.

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In 1993, Eugenia Butler invited a group of artists-some whom she had never met, others that she barely knew, and still others that were friends and neighbors-to join her for a meal and conversation at the Los Angeles Art Fair. What could be more commonplace than a conversation shared over the course of a meal? Yet, at the outset of several of these meals, Butler's guests expressed uncertainty about what was expected of them. No doubt their uneasiness spoke to the artificial architecture of the project. Located in a specially built room hidden behind the commercial booths of the 1993 Art/LA, Butler's commonplace invitation took on a mysterious charge. In this secret room, the convivial kitchen table was flanked by video cameras, suggesting the façade of a Hollywood stage set. Indeed, at one point Butler jokingly compared herself to a "television host." Over the course of four days in December, eight conversations were recorded and transmitted live to a series of monitors installed throughout the fair, including one in a café barely twenty feet away from the secret room. By conjoining actual conversations with their live broadcast, Butler's project alluded both to the growing prevalence of public surveillance and to our paradoxically diminishing faith in the veracity of photographic documentation, a recognition that had been brutally driven home in Los Angeles barely a year earlier when the home video of Rodney King's 1991 beating by police was dismissed as insufficient evidence. Thematically, however, Butler had other ambitions for the hidden kitchen table. As she explained during the first conversation, one of the motivations behind the Kitchen Table project was to understand the connections and differences between object making and artworks that produce social effects. In this regard, the Kitchen Table conversations actualized a shift in Butler's art practice that had been brewing for some time.

As has been noted previously in these pages, the Kitchen Table was initially inspired by Butler's childhood experiences at her family's kitchen table, where she often witnessed her mother having extraordinary conversations with artists. Butler even incorporated one of the chairs from her family home into the set of the 1993 Kitchen Table, where it functioned as a kind of talisman, connecting these conversations with her powerful experiences at her mother's table. Underscoring this connection, the press release for the Kitchen Table project recalled twelve-year-old Butler's impressions of a particular conversation: "They are talking a mile a minute and filling the space with their ideas. I listen quietly and I know I want to be a part of this." Thus, the young Butler effectively sketched out the format for the work she would actualize thirty-four years later.

In the days leading up to the first of the Kitchen Table meals, Butler referred to the project as "riding on the back of the elephant of commerce." This description clearly underscores the conjunction of aesthetics and capital that art fairs so blatantly articulate. Yet Butler's metaphor begs further inquiry. Who or what was the passenger riding atop capital's pachyderm? On the one hand, the rider's metaphorical identity seems almost obvious: more often than not the presence and participation of artists in art fairs is largely eclipsed by the commercial value added to the objects they produce. In an effort to undermine this reductive outcome, Butler's project simply broadcast the artists' presence into the fair, literally following her childhood impression and "filling the space" of the fair "with their ideas." The broadcast conversations projected on monitors effectively spatialized the artists' discourses, spreading them throughout the fair as ethereal objects captured and framed in the rectangular monitors. This effect helps to unpack Butler's metaphor further. For in addition to inserting the presence of artists, Butler's project was designed to represent the creative process in operation. Central to this outcome was Butler's fundamental understanding of ideas as objects.

In part, Butler's somewhat unusual perception of ideas as ethereal objects speaks to her development as a young Conceptual artist who actively exhibited on both coasts. Like many slightly older Conceptual art visionaries (John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner among them) Butler eschewed the material physicality of objects and instead created artworks that became visible through their use of text. For example, a series of her works from 1969 are composed of simple handwritten or typed statements that appear on vellum. The semi-translucent ground of the vellum enhances the abstract pronouncements of the text, which include phrases such as "A forward slip in time," "The continuum through which a thought proceeds," or "A condition of continuous transformation." The vellum provides the text with a physical terrain that allows the abstract ideas to become reified objects. Stubbornly visible in the otherwise empty field of the vellum, Butler's statements do not point to any concrete referential objects. Instead, the phrases recruit viewers to complete their condition as representational signs, for the ideas that they convey can only become meaningful through viewers' imaginations. In this regard, Butler shares territory with the Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, whose "sculptural statements"-also composed of text presented on material grounds-were designed to prompt viewers' imaginations. Rejecting the common interpretation of Conceptual artworks as dematerialized objects, Weiner argued: "No one dematerializes objects, that doesn't mean anything. As soon as you know something, it's an object." In what amounts to a reversal of this process, Butler similarly described her studio practice as pulling objects out of the invisible, as objects pouring out of her hands or falling directly out of her brain.

Despite the similarities between Butler and Weiner's works from the late sixties, there remains a subtle but significant difference. Most of Weiner's statements from this period-such as "One Standard Dye Marker Thrown into the Sea" ( General Statements, 1968) or "An object tossed from one country to another" ( Terminal Boundaries, 1969)-tended to reference absent but concrete objects or specific events. Butler's statements on the other hand registered abstract conditions. In other words, rather than prompting viewers' imaginations to visualize something that was absent, Butler's text invited viewers to imagine something that had no correlate in the visual. As a result, these works focus viewers' attention more specifically on the perceptual experience of an idea as a durational moment that unfolds in our bodies. While Weiner and Butler both considered ideas to be sculptural forms of knowledge, Butler's statements took a more kinetic approach in their construction of these forms and thereby focused viewers' attention on the manner in which ideas transform and develop through time. Accordingly, where Weiner defined his works as "sculptural statements," Butler referred to hers as "performative sculptures."

When seen from the perspective of Butler's earlier Conceptual artworks, the hidden dining table can be said to function as a sculptural armature that Butler and her collaborators used to build their "idea objects." Engaging the power of the video cameras, Butler transmitted these collaboratively crafted ideas into the art fair, where they had the potential to prompt the imaginations of the fair goers and even transform their perceptions of the other artworks on display there. Ultimately, Butler expected the Kitchen Table conversations to function as generators that not only produced ideas but also powered those ideas, moving them through different expressive bodies, where other levels of collaboration could take place.

Looking back on the Kitchen Table now, almost two decades later, we readily recognize it in the terms of participatory practices that increasingly dominated the 1990s; Nicolas Bourriaud dubbed those same practices "Relational Aesthetics" in 1998. Although Bourriaud never cited Butler's Kitchen Table or her subsequent conversation project, Fire in the Library (1997-98), they both fit neatly within his definition of relational artworks that engage common forms or functional models, such as meals, to render visible our relationships with the world. Noting the somewhat apolitical nature of Bourriaud's definition, Claire Bishop has redefined relational works as participatory art practices in which the traditional distinctions between artist and audience, production and reception collapse. "[The] emphasis is on collaboration and the collective dimension of social experience." In the Kitchen Table project Butler extended the performative address of her earlier Conceptual sculptures by inviting the power of the imagination to expand through the potential of collaboration. With Bishop's insightful definition in mind and some assistance from Édouard Glissant's 1990 text Poetics of Relation, it becomes possible to more fully grasp Butler's ambitious goals for the Kitchen Table.

Glissant draws upon the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (a favorite read of Butler's as well) to theorize a fluid understanding of identity as a shifting relational terrain of influences that is always in transition. In contrast to more binary constructions, Glissant's conception of identity entails an ongoing dialogue with difference: "Identity is no longer just permanence; it is a capacity for variation, yes, a variable-either under control or wildly fluctuating." Central to Glissant's project-and Butler's-is an understanding of the power of the imagination to move and transform the meaning of lived experiences by establishing new relationships with both the past and the present. The relational, however, can never be a passive experience; it demands participation and it flourishes through collaboration.

As noted above, the artists collaboratively constructed the Kitchen Table conversations; however, to fully understand the relevance of Glissant's notion of the relational for Butler's project it is necessary to consider another key ingredient of the Kitchen Table, namely its witnesses. Butler not only broadcast and documented the conversations on video, but she also invited human witnesses, namely curator and archivist Judith Hoffberg and critic Cuauhtémoc Medina. Unlike the other participants in the eight meals, Butler asked Hoffberg and Medina to observe the conversations silently. In doing so, Butler casts Hoffberg and Medina in a role that was comparable to her own role at her mother's table.

Butler does not address the role of the witnesses until the seventh conversation, when Michael Rotondi jokingly asked Medina if he swore to tell the whole truth. Rotondi's jest points to the challenge of testimony, which is always a secondary action derived from witnessing. Ultimately, a witness-whether human or technological-must create a narrative structure for the events she/he/it will recount. In short, testimony always involves some form of composition. The video cameras, for example, created a frame of reference and projected the Kitchen Table conversations from a particular point of view. As a result, they captured only certain aspects of the Kitchen Table scene. In other words the live video broadcast simultaneously confirmed (witnessed) the Kitchen Table conversations and subtly reconstructed (testified) them. Moreover, by broadcasting the conversations "live," the video cameras effectively collapsed witnessing and testifying, making them appear to be one action. In designating additional human witnesses, Butler thus worked against this effect and underscored how witnessing and testifying operate as separate but related activities.

The distinction between witnessing and testifying brings another important aspect of Butler's project into focus. As noted above, the live broadcast of the conversations had the potential to impact the fair goers' perceptions of the artworks on display. Nevertheless, the video broadcast was a one-way communication. In other words, the fair goers could be affected by the Kitchen Table conversations, but they could not participate in the construction of these conversations. Despite this seemingly exclusive structure, the fair goers were not passive participants in Butler's project. The Kitchen Table's central motif-eating a meal-offers important insight here. On the one hand, eating is a basic form of consumption. In fact, Georges Bataille drew this exact analogy in 1930 to define appropriation as a process of consumption (as opposed to excretion). The act of consuming food and making it a part of one's body, and by extension one's identity, provided Bataille with the seemingly perfect analogy to describe the homogenizing effects of Western colonization. Bataille's analogy, however, relies upon an understanding of food-and by extension colonized cultures-as a largely passive and entirely receptive form. Yet consumption entails a much more relationally transformative process. Food, for example, moves through the digestive tract, actively engaging with the systems of the body to create energy, flesh, waste, etc. Similarly, the broadcast conversations were meant to operate like a prepared meal that unfolds through the body; they were an organized sculptural form of dialogue that when consumed created new and different relationships, simultaneously transforming the perceptions of the consumers as well as the ideas consumed, even as these ideas were still being formulated in the hidden kitchen. Thus, Butler's project referenced another critical discourse that defined the nineties, namely how the shift in media toward twenty- four-hour news and information was impacting the ways in which we witness and participate in the world.

Significantly, Butler recognized that the bodies of the human witnesses (both Hoffberg and Medina as well as the art fair goers) have the capacity to perceive the world in a much more relational manner than the technological witnesses. In fact, when Butler explained the role of the human witnesses, she discussed them in terms of the collaborative nature of the project. Butler had every expectation that the human witnesses, like the technological witnesses, would also testify to what happened in the hidden kitchen, but she recognized that the human witnesses not only would register the events differently, but also they would transform what happened through a myriad of other relations and references that could be neither predicted nor controlled. Ultimately, through the human witnesses, the performative sculptures created at Butler's Kitchen Table rode out of the 1993 Los Angeles Art Fair and continued to move into the world.

Marie Shurkus is a contemporary art historian and media theorist. She is a visiting assistant professor of media studies at Pomona College as well as a core faculty member of Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Visual Art Program.

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Witnessing Eugenia Butler's Kitchen Table

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In 1993, Eugenia Butler invited a group of artists-some whom she had never met, others that she barely knew, and still others that were friends and neighbors-to join her for a meal and conversation at the Los Angeles Art Fair. What could be more commonplace than a conversation shared over the course of a meal?

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The Wounded Table, 1940

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The Wounded Table, a holy grail for Kahlo scholars, went missing after the artist donated it to the former Soviet Union. This self-portrait was painted during the end of 1939 to the beginning of 1940. In December of 1939, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's divorce became final. Frida started working on this painting as an expression of her despair and loneliness. The blood is dripping in the Wounded Table, 1940 as it was dripping on Frida's Tehuana skirt in The Two Fridas. This is her only other large painting, not only by size, but also by the complexity. In a letter to Muray she described she was "working like hell" to finish it to meet the deadline of January 17 for the opening of the "International Exhibition of Surrealism", in which the Wounded Table was displayed with other elite Surrealism artists' masterpieces, e.g. Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali, and The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte.

In this painting, the table has human legs and its surface is bleeding on the few knots. This table is a symbol of Frida's sense of broken family from the divorce. There are several objects around the table. In the center was Frida herself, surrounded by all the objects who accompanies her. On one side is her sister Cristina's two children, which is a reflection of her desire to have her own children. On the other side is a deer, one of her favorite pet and she use that as her surrogate children. Sitting right next to her is a Nayarit figure. The tall Judas figure is considered as Diego Rivera, who plays the role of the betrayal. Looking back on the divorce, Rivera admitted his wrong-doing: "I simply wanted to be free to carry on with any woman who caught my fancy... was I simply the depraved victim of my own appetites?" These characters are arranged in the scene that recalls The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci.

Inspired by a Nayarit sculpture of an embracing couple (now in the Frida Kahlo Museum), Frida elongated the arm of the idol that sits on her left. And, perhaps to emphasize her link with pre-Columbian culture, she made the idol's arm continuous with her own. The clay skeleton, with its pelvic bone tied to a chair to keep it upright, lifts a lock of her long hair in the coiled spring that forms his forearm. He seems intimately linked with Frida, as well." Indeed, all three Mexican artifacts are probably aspects of Frida, for the idol has peg legs, and the skeleton and the Judas have broken and bloodied right feet.

Frida's use of the drapes in this picture invoked a device that had been employed by a number of the Old Masters as a trompe-l'oeil way of drawing the viewer into the composition, pointing to the artifice of the scene, and also showcasing their own ability to paint something as lifelike as the drapery hanging in front of a picture; this was the case, for example, in The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer, and Danae by Rembrandt.

The Wounded Table was last exhibited in Warsaw in 1955, after which it disappeared, and is the subject of an ongoing international search.

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The Wounded Table, a holy grail for Kahlo scholars, went missing after the artist donated it to the former Soviet Union. This self-portrait was painted during the end of 1939 to the beginning of 1940. In December of 1939, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's divorce became final.

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ArtTable members visiting ART HOUSE, a Noguchi-inspired teahouse, located on Leonard and Louise Riggio's 13-acre Long Island estate.

Mission

ArtTable is the foremost professional organization dedicated to advancing the leadership of womxn in the visual arts. Through our membership network and community initiatives, we expand opportunities for womxn from diverse backgrounds and at all stages of their careers, fostering a stronger future for all womxn in the arts.

ArtTable members can connect with the 1200+ members and gain a network of professional peers spread across 7 countries, including the U.S., where we have 9 chapters, located in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC. In addition to members across the country outside these areas. ArtTable members can be anywhere in the world!

Board & Staff
Explore Career Opportunities
Strategic Plan 2020 - 2022

ArtTable continues its dedication to supporting womxn in the arts at all stages of their careers. In pursuit of this mission we have implemented a plan to further advance our initiatives with a focus on advocacy, inclusivity, membership, strategic revenue growth and technological advancement over the next 3 years.

Advocacy

ArtTable strives to design programs that serve as forums for discussion of critical issues by increasing the flexibility of the national programming structure to be more responsive to such topics as they arise. Additionally, ArtTable is committed to forming partnerships with other mission-driven organizations and brands that support ArtTable's mission and related initiatives.

Inclusivity

Building upon previous work, ArtTable continually facilitates national conversations around equity and diversity in the field of visual arts and utilizes its platforms to amplify individual member voices and perspectives. A primary goal for this area is for ArtTable to expand its existing Diversity Fellowship program, established in 2000, including more placements throughout the country.

Membership

ArtTable will focus on creating meaningful offerings that are relevant to our members' interests. In addition, to advance personal and professional growth of members and the larger field, prioritization will be given to the development of in-person and digital networking.

Strategic Revenue Growth

ArtTable seeks to strengthen its financial future by embarking on initiatives to expand the organization's strategic revenue growth, including but not limited to diversifying income streams with grant opportunities and corporate partnerships, expanding our legacy giving program, and growing our membership base through targeted outreach.

Technological Advancement

ArtTable recognizes that the need to improve its technology is fundamental for sustainability. ArtTable seeks to upgrade the appearance of our website to be more reflective of its mission and the visual arts industry and to improve its back-end technology to better understand both its membership and the role of womxn in the visual arts overall. These technological advances will enable ArtTable to be a better resource to all womxn in the field.

History

ArtTable Southern California members in front of Noah Purifoy's "No Contest (bicycles)" (1991). This work was a part of the exhibition, Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

ArtTable began in individual homes, at lunch and dinner tables in New York City in 1980. As founding member Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz said, "The key to it all was all these womxn doing different things...doing them well. It became a wonderful thread...and then suddenly it had a life of its own. Mushroomed." Today, we are a national nonprofit organization with a mutual support network of over 1,200 womxn throughout the United States, with chapters in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. , Florida, Northern California, Southern California, and the Northwest, as well as serving many at-large members throughout the country. Our expanding membership is inclusive of womxn in all stages of their careers who exemplify leadership in the administration, business, finance, management, promotion, scholarship, and stewardship of the visual arts. To learn more about our history, the pioneering womxn who have made up ArtTable's membership, and the significant achievements they made together between 1980 and 2005, read Changing the Equation, ArtTable's 25th Anniversary publication.

View our Archive

View our program archive

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Mission ArtTable is the foremost professional organization dedicated to advancing the leadership of womxn in the visual arts. Through our membership network and community initiatives, we expand opportunities for womxn from diverse backgrounds and at all stages of their careers, fostering a stronger future for all womxn in the arts.

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Alvin Ailey Tribute to The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

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JD Malat Gallery Dinner party with artist Henrik Uldalen

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Overview

Dorothy Cross lives and works in Ireland. She works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, video and installation, examining the relationship between living beings and the natural world. A sense of place pervades her practice. Living in Connemara, a rural area on Ireland's wild west coast, Cross sees the body and nature as sites of constant change, creation and destruction, new and old.

She has participated in numerous international group shows including the 1993 Venice Biennale, the 1997 Istanbul Biennial, and the 1998 and 2002 Liverpool Biennial. She also took part in the ground-breaking 1994 exhibition Bad Girls in the ICA, London, and the CCA, Glasgow; the 1998 exhibition Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self Representation, which was shown at MIT List Art Center, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the San Francisco MOMA.

Many of Cross' works incorporate items found on the shore, including boats and animal skins, while others reflect on the environment. During the 90s, the artist produced a series of works using cow udders, which drew on the animals' rich store of symbolic associations across cultures to investigate the construction of sexuality and subjectivity. She has worked on several large-scale public projects, most memorably the award-winning Ghost Ship (1998). In recent years, her practice has focused on nature and the ocean, working with maligned animals such as jellyfish and shark, and exploring rarely accessible areas like sea caves or shell grottos.

A major retrospective of Cross's work was held at IMMA in 2005, and in 2012 she was part of the IMMA @NCH group exhibition, Time out of Mind In 2014 Cross was invited to curate a unique exhbition from the Irish National Collections entitled Trove, and in 2017/18 her work featured in the IMMA Collection exhibition Coast-Lines.

Other previous exhibitions include Reclaimed, Linda Pace Foundation, San Antonio (2018 - 19), Glance, New Art Centre, Roche Court, UK (2017-18); Connemara, Turner Contemporary, UK (2013), touring to Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2014); Eye of Shark, Lismore Castle Arts, Co. Waterford (2014); Bloomberg Space, London (2009); Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2008); IMMA (2005); Douglas Hyde Gallery (2002, 1993 & 1988); Camden Arts Centre (1993); ICA Philadelphia (1991). The artist has participated in Venice Biennale (1993), Istanbul Biennial (1997) and Liverpool Biennial (1998), and the groundbreaking 1994 exhibition Bad Girls, ICA London and CCA, Glasgow.

Cross is included in the collections of IMMA; Norton Collection, Santa Monica; Art Pace Foundation, Texas; Goldman Sachs Collection, London; The Arnolfini Trust, Bristol and TATE, London.

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Dorothy Cross lives and works in Ireland. She works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, video and installation, examining the relationship between living beings and the natural world. A sense of place pervades her practice. Living in Connemara, a rural area on Ireland's wild west coast, Cross sees the body and nature as [...]

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" Vibrant Matter promises to invigorate ethical and political judgment by attuning us to the material world, to ourselves, in new ways. Bennett wisely encourages us to practice such judgments without the banisters of deadening binaries of subject-object and human-nonhuman. In this way, we are left with an exciting, but daunting challenge of living democratically as and amidst vital matter." - Torrey Shanks, Theory & Event

" Vibrant Matter takes us on a journey through the philosophical tradition of critical vitalism - or, in Bennett's terms, vital materialism - in order to help us recognize the profound yet delightful weirdness of being in a body that only seems to belong to us."
- Natania Meeke and Antónia Szabari, Los Angeles Review of Books

" Vibrant Matter will reward readers by opening many fields of inquiry that require responses. The reconceptualization of the material world that Vibrant Matter represents is a meaningful step in the direction of reformulating many of the debates within environmental philosophy that continue to retain the vestiges of overt dualism and its less obvious manifestation in the subject-object distinction." - Bryan E. Bannon, Environmental Philosophy

"[An] eloquent, carefully reasoned book. . . . With Bennett's keen insights, I believe I can now show students (and others, maybe even some colleagues) that, through the concept, the sensibility, the practice of vibrant materialities, people in all walks of life can see the sense in treating both nature and artifacts 'more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically' (p.18)." - Thomas Princen, Perspectives on Politics

"How elating I found reading Vibrant Matter, with its eloquent vision of an ethics of the nonhuman. Bennett argues for a perceptual style open to the appearance of thing-power: we who study the texts and objects of a remote age can get behind that, I think. Indeed, for those of us for whom time doesn't simply pass into lostness we are already behind it, still feeling the power of history's things, which didn't know they were supposed to be still. " - Jeffrey J. Cohen, In the Middle blog

"Bennett's is one of those books where, on finishing, you want to begin immediately again to experience the excitement and élan vital of eloquent, simple ideas presented in clear, concise and considered prose, wherein the presence of a generous, kind and unpretentious author speaks straight into your understanding. Vibrant Matter is fresh, alert, quiet and potent, a door opening in a stuffy room to let the outside in, which lets it speak so as to embolden us to breathe differently. It will redraw the boundaries of political thought; it's already doing so. Read it." - Mark Jackson, Emotion, Space and Society

"Bennett's proposals are innovative, and while in the end she may raise more questions than she can offer answers to, Vibrant Matter is a text ripe with possibilities. The strength of the work is its careful treatment of nonhumans as vital forces and the numerous examples employed to develop a political ecology of things." - Katherine F. Chandler, Qui Parle

"Orienting us to re-encounter both nature and familiar objects as newly strange and pulsing with 'thing-power,' Bennett challenges our worn assumptions concerning the hierarchy between humans and things, the workings of causality, and our deep cultural attachment to matter and nature as inanimate. . . . Her book is surprising, refreshing, and troubling." - Lori J. Marso, Political Theory

"Overall, I am attracted by the ideas Bennett presents. They lead to new ways of thinking about things and artifacts, and for those of us who are used to think about embodied interaction, user experience, etc. many of the ideas are not that far fetched. I am curious to see how this and similar new philosophical attempts will be translated into more concrete activities and approaches relevant for design. This new evolution of ideas concerned with the status of 'things' and of the material world is highly interesting and with Bennett's work we have another example of why we need it and how it could be used." - Erik Stolterman, Transforming Grounds blog

"What Jane Bennett has delivered is the most precise and compelling account of a more than human politic sand why it matters. Vibrant Matters is the best argument to date of how materiality operates as a vital force, as much more than social construction or brute resistance or recalcitrance. In respecting the stuff of the world, in being attentive to it, Bennett has pushed political philosophy way beyond its comfort zone: something that was long overdue and from which there is no return." - Gay Hawkins, Cultural Studies Review

"For the sake of assuaging harms already inflicted we have always cobbled together publics that deal with vibrant matters of floods, fires, earthquakes and so on. For the sake of preventing unseen future harms, Bennett's book argues that we need to take a closer look at how we are embedded in a web of mutual affect that knows no bounds between living and nonliving, human and nonhuman. It is in this refreshingly naïve 'no-holds-barred' approach that Bennett's work has much to offer for a reconsideration of our role as thinking, speaking humans in a cosmos of vibrant matter that we continually depoliticize even in our efforts to 'protect' and 'save' the earth . . . a highly recommended read." - Stefan Morales, M/C Reviews

"In Vibrant Matter, Bennett encourages us to think slowly about those ideas that run rampantly through our lives as educators.... I found Bennett's approach made the conceptual renderings of new feminist materialists such as Barad, Ahmed and Braidotti, to educational settings more accessible." - Jennifer Clutterbuck, Educational Review

"Because Bennett's objectives are both philosophical and political, she offers two suggestions for fostering a discernment that will temper ontological anthropocentrism. . . . Bennett, through her actionable approach, successfully strays from critical theory's popular method of 'demystification,' a method that leaves ethics out to dry." - Wesley Mathis, Communication Design Quarterly

"Bennett is a philosopher and political theorist. But her intellectual work is not primarily about creating new theories. In her writing, she expertly distills and juxtaposes the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, Immanuel Kant, Martha Nussbaum, and others, but her goal is often to create a mood. She wants readers to adopt and embody an ethos that makes room for the vitality of matter." - Morgan Meis, The New Yorker

" Vibrant Matter is a fascinating, lucid, and powerful book of political theory. By focusing on the 'thing-side of affect,' Jane Bennett seeks to broaden and transform our sense of care in relation to the world of humans, non-human life, and things. She calls us to consider a 'parliament of things' in ways that provoke our democratic imaginations and interrupt our anthropocentric hubris." - Romand Coles, author of Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy

" Vibrant Matter represents the fruits of sustained scholarship of the highest order. As environmental, technological, and biomedical concerns force themselves onto worldly political agendas, the urgency and potency of this analysis must surely inform any rethinking of what political theory is about in the twenty-first century." - Sarah Whatmore, coeditor of The Stuff of Politics: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life

"This manifesto for a new materialism is an invigorating breath of fresh air. Jane Bennett's eloquent tribute to the vitality and volatility of things is just what we need to revive the humanities and to redraw the parameters of political thought." - Rita Felski, author of Uses of Literature

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" Vibrant Matter promises to invigorate ethical and political judgment by attuning us to the material world, to ourselves, in new ways. Bennett wisely encourages us to practice such judgments without the banisters of deadening binaries of subject-object and human-nonhuman. In this way, we are left with an exciting, but daunting challenge of living democratically as and amidst vital matter."

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Laurence Ginnell

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Outline

Message featuring a photograph of horses sheltering under a giant table and chairs claims that the horse owner built the massive furniture after he was denied council permission to build a more traditional horse shelter.

Brief Analysis

The photograph is genuine but the story of why it was built is untrue. While the giant furniture does indeed provide shelter to horses, it was built in such a way as a means of promoting the products of a German wood merchant. It was not constructed as a way of bypassing a council building restriction as claimed in the message. A photograph of the furniture and horses was published in Time magazine back in 2003 and in various other publications in the years since.

Example

This farm owner was denied a council permit to build a horse shelter. Fortunately, you don't need a permit to build a table and chairs.

Detailed Analysis

This rather compelling photograph depicts several horses sheltering under a giant table and chairs, complete with massive table decoration and tablecloth. According to the message that travels with the image, a farm owner built the unusual shelter for his animals after he was denied a council permit to built a more traditional structure. Some commentators have suggested that the image is the result of "photoshopping" or was made using tiny models of horses rather than real animals.

The photograph is genuine and depicts real horses under genuinely gigantic furniture. However, the claim that the furniture was built because the farmer was refused council permission to build a normal shelter is untrue. In fact, although it does provide shade and shelter for the horses in the field, the furniture was primarily built as a novel means of promoting the products of Jens Braun, a German wood merchant. A photograph of the furniture and horses was published by Time Magazine in June 2003, and included the following caption:

Three horses try to hide from the rain under an oversized table and chair in a pasture near Doellstaedt, eastern Germany. The huge garden furniture was installed by a local wood merchant to promote his products.

Another picture of the furniture and horses was featured as the Telegraph Picture of the Day for 2nd November 2011 with the caption:

Horses stand in the shadows of a gigantic wooden table and two chairs during mild autumnal weather in a meadow near Doellstaedt, central Germany

More images of the oversized furniture can be viewed via an AP Image search. The images include captions such as the following:

Horses stand in the shadows of a gigantic table and two chairs during heavy summer heat in Doellstaedt near Erfurt, eastern Germany, on Friday, July 6, 2004. Wood dealer Jens Braun built the unusual furniture as a protection for his horses.

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Giant Table and Chairs Horse Shelter Photograph - Hoax-Slayer

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Message featuring a photograph of horses sheltering under a giant table and chairs claims that the horse owner built the massive furniture after he was denied council permission to build a more traditional horse shelter. The photograph is genuine but the story of why it was built is untrue.