Day: November 25, 2010
bad at sports on BYOB LA
Was a little disappointed that, in an otherwise copacetic discussion about the BYOB LA show, Guthrie, Seecoy, and Artie smiled favorably on this assessment of the BYOB NY incarnation (from Karen Archey's Post of Revenge):
the content and quality of work shown in such exhibitions is relatively superfluous to the political stance encompassing it. Most important here is the gesture that - perhaps in the face of web-based social networking - physical meet-ups and community building are vital as ever.
As a biased participant in the NY show, I say she's wrong, the work was great. The meet-up was nice, too, but ultimately it's about what's on the walls. I wrote some un-objective, boosterish comments on AFC and believe all that stuff. As for "political stance," so tired of these warmed-over post-structuralist attempts to peg every event as political. It was in a gallery, deal.
when the walls fell
From Alan N. Shapiro's Star Trek: 20 Basic Principles:
Star Trek Basic Principle #7: Non-Signifying Language
In early capitalism, the law of accumulation is limited to the science of "political economy" and production. In late capitalism, it expands to wider instances of consumer culture; psychology (self and unconscious as psychic metaphors of capital); and linguistics ("signification" to infinity). In Chomsky’s linguistics, the brain is a "universal language machine" making possible the translation of all grammars and signifying systems. In Saussure’s linguistics, the playful gap between "signifier" and "signified" is barred by positing their equivalence in a linguistic sign that fixes a word’s identity. But language is sometimes other than a means of communication. In metaphor or poetry, or in the “mythical” speech of the Tamarians, language is not directly signifying. It is symbolic, ambivalent, evocative, and even destructive. "Meanings" are exchanged, subverted, enjoyed, and transformed in relationship and encounter.
image via hi5mountain