Last thursday I had my first experience as an event photographer. I found it quite enjoyable, specifically because my favourite kind of photography is spontaneous portraiture and this was an experience where nearly everyone was happy and excited to have their picture taken by a “professional” photographer.
Saturna Island, British Columbia is one of my favourite places, and the hike beginning at the summit of Mt. Warburton and descending the Brown Ridge is amoung the most scenic in the world. Eventually you can descend all the way to the water, but for much of the hike the grade is easy as you traverse steep but not dangerous feeling slopes, which change colour with the weather.
When we arrived the whether was thick with fog, but before long the sun came out and the yellow grass shone in its glory.
The Gulf Islands are easy to miss if you live in British Columbia. You figure “I’ve seen that” because you’ve been to the lower Mainland, and to Vancouver Island. But both of those places are rainy and dreary, nothing like the dry Islands in between which weather systems pass over but do not get stuck on. Nor are the people alike – my theory is the difficulty of getting to the islands keep the people there quirky. You have to be a bit strange to buy property on a small island where you will be entirely beholden to a ferry company to transport yourself to anything larger than the local general store.
Or do you? The gulf Islands are loved because there are still those who will pay more to be as far as possible from a Wal Mart and Canadian tire. For those who recognize that in life we have a choice what we will put in our visual field, and that what we see and where we are is as important to quality of life as what we consume or possess. If you lived there, looking at these photos, you’d be home now.
Kaela and I have been going to the AGO every Wednesday night since New Years; it’s free after 6pm, and I think it’s both good to have rhythms in life and to make an effort to fill your visual field with beautiful and stimulating things. This week we took one of the tours which proved to be an excellent idea. Don showed us sculpture throughout the gallery beginning with two Rodin sculptures in the central hall and moving on through the African sculpture exhibit and finally, to the Henry Moore room. I’ve always disliked Moore’s sculpture; I didn’t have a sense of it, it alienated me and I found it physically off-putting. But after Don’s explanations which were grounded in our intuitive sense of the work and the concepts the work brings forth I found myself intensely liking the sculptures, appreciating them and wanting to spend more time with them.
Anyone interested in coming with Kaela and I to the art gallery on a Wednesday should get in contact with me and we can meet outside the AGO at 6pm.
Photo Credit: Kaela Greenstien
A protest photograph is forwarded on facebook. An Egyptian tweet comes through on the Aljezeera or Guardian twitter-live-feed. Where do these “come from”? The easy answer is of course “the photographer” or “the city square” or “the author of the tweet” (as if tweets had authors like Moby Dick). The problem with the easy answer is that it’s wrong, another problem is the difficulty of explaining how it is wrong.
Take, for instance, any form of cultural production. Take sculpture, take pottery, take essay-writing, take photography, take architecture. Where is the work produced – what is the location of production/instantiation of a/the new artifact? It is not when the photograph is taken, or when the sculpture is planned or conceived - it is rather when a decision is made to show this photograph rather than another. Or, to construct this sculpture at full scale rather than one which is intuited as less potentially successful (I’m thinking of Serra’s workflow here). The cultural production is, in other words, in the decision to put forth the work. Not the making of the work, but the setting it into the cultural location, produces its reality and the infinite (but not incoherent) potential connections, effects, excrements, alienations.
To be blatantly honest, I’ve never had an explicit desire to visit Switzerland. To me, it’s one of the subordinate European countries – without it’s own language, and without a strong international identity. Sure, it’s famous for it’s “neutrality” – but that’s like being famous for having the most beige house. Or so I thought. A short visit has very much changed my perception and understanding of this place.
Switzerland has a distinctive political history. It is essentially a country in the alps, which means crossing it has always been a difficult task. An exhibit at the national museum called “no one has been here all the time”, (implicitly targeting recent xenophobic trends in swiss politics) emphasized the sheer number of different migrations into and through what are today the swiss alps. This explains the trend away from cultural continuity – even “Swiss German” is spoken with a different dialect in different valleys. So, rather than the usual centralized state, Switzerland has always been a federation of provinces, or “cantons”. Even after becoming its incorporation as a modern state, cantons retain significant political power – enough to block woman’s suffrage until 1991 in one canton – and, I’ve actually been told, that some electoral processes in some places remain restricted to men. This is the conservative side of direct democracy – any changes must be approved by the voting public through constant referenda. As in the British Columbian referendum on first nations rights, it is not obvious majority votes on minority rights are democratic at all.
I want to say a word on Swiss Neutrality – it’s a load of a lie. During the second war they produced ammunition for both sides, and after 1940, exclusively for the Nazis. They complied with racist Nazi laws – marking Jewish passports with a “J”, and not accepting Jewish refugees . In other words – directly collaborating with the genocide. Furthermore, swiss banks held Nazi moneys, which includes stolen Jewish property, and even gold from the false teeth of executed Jews. Swiss collaboration with the Nazis may not have been on the level of Vichy France, but it was certainly enough that it could have been subject to de-nazification. It wasn’t, however, and it takes its place among states which feel no remorse for the crimes of its past special exhibit with closed yesterday at Zurich’s art museum was of the art collection of Emil Georg Buhrle, a swiss man whose fortune was made during the war selling arms to the Nazis. Instead of being critical of the origin of his wealth, the exhibit celebrated him as a Swiss hero, someone who kept the economy running during troubled times.
If I had stayed in Zurich I wouldn’t feel as if I’d really gotten a sense of Swiss “swissness” – for that you need to go to the mountains. If you’ve seen or read Heidi, the answer is yes, it really does look like that. Kai and I took the train to Airolo, and a bus halfway up the mountain. The resulting hike was exquisite – well maintained, and passing by several settlements in various stages of repair and ruin. At the top there was a power dam, and in the valley a highway, airport, entrance to the third longest road tunnel in the world, and rail line. In other words, the place is exceedingly ge-stell. But, this didn’t damage the picturesque experience of nordic walking through the ancient land. This is the essence, I think, of modern switzerland – huge mega projects surmounting the Alps, and at the same time, the Alps set to work for personal enjoyment of citizens and tourists. I shouldn’t complain, it’s great for pictures.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal is free. This means you don’t have to pay, (except for some temporary exhibitions). That and the collection is quite astonishing – including the likes of Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, etc… There is also a serious ancient Greece exhibit which, unlike the ROM’s, doesn’t pretend that Roman copies of Greek statues are Greek. There is an excellent exhibit on 20th century style and design. There is an expansive collection of European painting between the 15th and 19th centuries.
In other words, there is enough here that one can get a sense of the entire history of painting in a day. As such, welcome to Tristan’s comprehensive theory of European painting. Just kidding of course, but even a cursory look through does reveal some very interesting events. First off, Painting seems to have progressed quite slowly between the 15 and 19th centuries – many pieces from the early 19th century could be confused with things painted hundreds of years earlier. Basically, until Monet, the advances seem to be mostly technical – as far as style is concerned, there are 14th century landscapes and portraits that look like early 19th century works by lesser painters. 
With Monet, however, the codes seem to break down. “Impressionism” means the self-consciously recognized product of painting is emotional. The symbolic codes become the object of play (Picasso), and dismissal (painting black squares). Rejection of symbolic codes for a time is revolutionary (dada), but is later co-opted by the same system it wishes not to reproduce (dada on Starbucks water bottles). 
What is most amazing about this history is how, taking Monet as a fulcrum, we can see such a disparate rate of change of artistic style on either historical side – before, 300 years of relative calm – after, less than a hundred before the codes have completely broken down. Of course, they do not disappear – symbolic painting and representational painting persist, but persist as one code among many options. The old code was not characterized by its properties, its attributes, but by it being the-code, the dominant – not one part of a plurality.
The reason the current age can be said to “have no style” is not that there are no trends in design, not that no one is doing anything new in sculpture or painting or furniture – but rather that no unified code develops amongst people ever inventing the new. Foundings ever repeat, but do not take hold. There are too many choices, freedoms, possibilities. The system embraces it’s own deconstruction. The post-modern self is the one products are marketed towards.
This evening my mother and I took advantage of the new Golden Ears bridge to visit Allouette lake. While the day use area at the south end of the lake is not terribly interesting, we found a wonderful spot near the north beach campground:
This protected inlet is a wonderful little swimming hole, with clear deep water and some short cliffs of which you can jump (I couldn’t resist). The water is luminescent green colour, due either to glacier run off, or perhaps reflected light from the trees.
Cycling in Vancouver
Both yesterday and today I’ve been taking advantage of Vancouver’s various cycle paths to put a good deal of enjoyable kilometers under my tires. It’s hard to compare Vancouver cycling with cycling in Toronto, but I can put it this way – in Vancouver, I actually look forward to getting on my bike.
In Toronto, getting on a bicycle means crashing over gaps in the poorly maintain roads – not that Vancouver’s are perfect, but the lack of freeze thaw makes things easier. In Toronto, being in a bike lane means constantly having to anticipate a door prize – Vancouver does have some of these death-trap bike lanes, but for the most part you can ride on traffic-calmed streets that are actually set up for bicycles to go through. I tend to think of Vancouver’s bike routes as “bike highways”, although you can’t actually go that fast on them.
But, aside from all these planning and weather differences – the real reason cycling in Vancouver is an order of magnitude more enjoyable is simply that there is more to see. An hours cycling in Vancouver can take you up Commercial drive, down the central valley greenway to Science World, along the downtown seaside bike route by Yaletown and the West End, past English Bay, Lost Lagoon, and then twisting around the Stanley Park Seawall back to the West End. Sure, Toronto has some nice places, but they don’t repeat, don’t all tie together with the geological nice-ness of Vancouver.
Sure, Toronto has the Don and Humber Valleys, which can provide a good half-days cycle each – but getting to them from anywhere you might live means trekking down dangorous and poorly maintained city streets. Bloor Street this summer was in a state of disrepair that would embarrass a third-world dictator – and this means you can’t ride fast enough to not be an obstacle to traffic. Neither does it help that most major streets in Toronto connect to high speed freeways, which changes the pace of driving in general away from a tempo at which bikes can be anything but a nuisance.
People in Vancouver lead charmed lives. And it’s not like they don’t take advantage of it – everywhere I’ve been today has been chalk full of people, all sorts. The Beaches, the bike racks, the walking paths, there are folks out everywhere. And yet, as I sit in the shade near the Second Beach concession in Stanley Park, nothing feels crowded. The opposite of the fireworks then. No, but even the fireworks at Kits beach last night were not really crowded – the rain kept too many Surrey-ites away for that.
It’s often said that Vancouver isn’t any “fun” – that we have a real shortage of festivals compared to other “World Class” cities (whatever “world class” means, anyway). To remedy this there are some new events happening – yesterday I spent a bit of time at a free music festival in Crab Park, and also stopped to listen to a few songs at the South-Asian music celebration festival at Plaza of Nations. Both of these events were extremely poorly attended. Now, this might be because they were poorly advertised, or just because they were lousy events – but I have a feeling that poor attendance to events like this might have something to do with the fact there are plenty of things to do on a sunny Saturday in Vancouver other than go to a mediocre free concert.
Yesterday morning my father, myself, and a few roomates and friends piled into my new one dollar van to drive north of Toronto to see Richard Serra’s early site-specific work, “Shift”. Although I first heard about the piece four years ago in a course on late Heidegger, a lack of private transportation meant this was my first time seeing it – a very appropriate first use for the new van.
The piece is set into a field, but not the field next to the road. Instead, there is a field of mud and soybeans between the sculpture and the road. This, and the fact that it is unpublicized, is an essential part of the work – it comes from a period of artists removing themselves from the gallery scene. (However, I don’t think it would be awful in the future for the work to become public, a small interpretive centre, gravel walking paths etc…)
The work is set into a farmer’s field which is in use, so around the piece is planted a crop (soybeans we think, and from all the corn lying around it is likely on a rotation). The farmer is surely using a very large machine, and thus can’t cut too close to the sculpture – which means most of the concrete is hidden underneath wild plants. Mostly, you don’t literally see the sculpture, but more of a hedge of wild grasses and flowers encircling it. My father was quick to point out that this hedge of wild in the middle of a cultivated field isn’t wasted space – it actually benefits the farming activity by being a natural habitat for bumblebees, and generally increasing the field’s biodiversity.
What these hedges cover is a series of concrete walls extending horizontally along a falling slope until they reach a certain height above the ground, at which point they drop to the ground and begin extending horizontally again. The work represents the way the field appears on a topographical map – in other words, representationally, according to concept, idea. Perfect. Demonstrating the topographical representation in a concrete medium allows the actual field to show up in its organic, sinuous character – which differs essentially from the rigid straightness of the representational line.
At first, then, not being able to see the concrete lines appears to detract from the work. But soon enough one can see that the overgrown hedges are actually part of it – they help bend the concrete flatlines into the curve of the field.
In this photo it’s easy to see the curve in the lower section of this part of the work. It’s not an illusion – since the ground is curving, the height of the grasses that surround the concrete do curve – the concrete stays flat, and is only exposed at the end (bottom left). You can also see these curves reflected in the rows of planted soybeans. Except – these are not the same curves at all. The curves in the rows of plants are actually representational curves, they are planned out geometrically by the farmer who wants to plant the field in the most efficient way, to extract from it the maximum number of calories or dollars. Whereas, the curve in the wild hedge has no perfect linearity or pre-planning or expected function – the plants grow up and recoil back by the law of the propagation of life, rather than a system-thinking.
Shift is a wonderful piece – it provides a place to reflect on representation and nature, on farming and efficiency, on publicness and the secret, and on the possibility of spaces that are somehow excluded or exempt from the all-domination of the market. Yesterday was my first trip to it and I hope to visit it many more times in the years ahead.
What is Representation, how does the WTP turn truth into a value, and how does the inadequacy of that value require another value, and what does this allow us to say about the essence of Art?
Representation is not, at least in its purest form, the determination of the manifold of intuition as an object, but rather the activity of the will in which the will is brought before itself and tested. Representation “orders the will forth into the will’s own testing”, and “in such testing the will first represents itself purely and therewith in its highest form”(87). Thus, the representing (as process) is not initially the representing of an object, and the representation (as thing) is not an object. Rather, the representation (as thing) is the “encircling sphere” held as a fixed constant, a certainty, at the will’s disposal – and thereby it is turned into object. And representing (as process) is the activity of bringing that having-secured before the will such that it can be tested – in order to evaluate the certainty of the its securedness, its surety, its aptness to serve for the sake of the will’s preservation as continued willing by being known as a fixed-constant on disposal. And only thereby can representing become understood as imagination drawing lines around differing intensities of qualia. Truth is this certainty – truth is just another name for the activity that “makes secure the constant reserve…out of which the Will to Power wills itself.”(85)
Now we can easily see how and that the WTP has turned truth into a value. Truth is the name for highest value of preservation, because it is the form of the stable constant at-disposal for the will for the sake of its preservation – its ability to continually will. In other words, when what we hold to be stable endurance on hand for the will’s preservation as willing is shown to be, actually, as stable as we hold it to be – i.e. when it passes the test of being brought before the will in representation that tests the surety of its being-on-disposal, we call it “true”. But truth cannot be the highest value of WTP, because preservation is not enough. The Will to Power is the perspect/point-of-view of value-positing that always posits preserving and enhancement conditions together. But if in every representation truth is posited as the highest value of preservation, is there a correspondingly dominant value of enhancement? Nietzsche calls this value “Art”.
“Art is the essence of all willing that opens up perspectives and takes possession of them”(86)
Art is worth more than truth because the WTP posits not simply preservation conditions but preservation-enhancement conditions. The will, in value-positing is essentially two-fold. Since truth preserves the will’s ability to will itself by making certain the availability at the disposal of its current encircling sphere as a fixed-presence, it never pushes the will into a new sphere, outside its current boundary, towards “the possibility of command”(85). We should take the word “command” quite seriously here – one does not command the sphere which is already at one’s disposal – one commands only where there is the possibility of resistance – exactly what is eliminated in the securing of the encircling sphere as fixed constant on disposal. The possibility of command is the possibility of further subordination – but this subordination is not the discovery of something always already subordinate for the first time, rather, it is the making of new spheres subordinate by means of truth. But before you can have more truth, you must have art. Art is the value that opens up perspectives (new possibilities for value-positing, or, because perspective is already a sighting of something as a value, new value positing as such), and takes possession of them. Taking possession means not simply asserting them as values, but grasping them as mine, taking them over, becoming what one is through them, achieving them. This is the idea of “Command”: to take possession of new values not simply by putting them initially into stable reserve (certainty, and therefore truth), but by actively grasping them in a ek-static reach that extends beyond, out of, the stable constance of the sphere of preservation.
Art “goads the willing out beyond itself”(86)
But the possibility of command is not the first moment of art, but a subsequent moment. Art first must open up spheres of new possibilities, and it is this opening up that enables the possibility of command. Heidegger calls art “the value that first opens all heights of ascent”, and “[t]he one, [which] ever in a fresh way, calls forth the other”(86). What is this “other”? The other Is the new spheres of possibilities, the open, the new, the fresh. This means that the WTP is more than truth, more than certainty and surety – the WTP puts itself at risk and goes beyond the bounded, the safe encircling secured sphere. This beyond as that which can be grappled with and grasped is nothing other than the notion of enhancement as such – there are no guarantees when it comes to enhancement. One enhances on the basis of the sedimentary, preserving base one has in certainty and surety, but this security in advance never assures that any particular enhancement will be achieved. We should not think of “art” here solely in the sense of the artist (who is “only a preliminary stage” for Nietzsche) nor as work-of-art in the modern sense as mechanically reproduced object. We would be closer if we think art as poesis, as making-producing. However, in a note from early summer 1885, Nietzsche indicates that we might think of this “other” as an other, i.e. a resistance to be encountered and dominated, and one name for this encounter is “martial art”:
“…[I]n commanding there is a concession that the opponent’s absolute power has not been vanquished, not incorporated, dissolved. ‘Obeying’ and ‘commanding’ are forms of martial art”(Notebook 36 note 22). (my emphasis)
