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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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The "Great Explainer," physicist and teacher Richard Feynman, speaking in 1964 at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (published under the title, "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society," in a collection of Feynman's essays, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Perseus Publishing, 1999) p.108-9:
...[T]here is a kind of responsibility which the scientists feel toward each other which you can represent as a kind of morality. What's the right way and the wrong way to report results? Disinterestedly, so that the other man is free to understand precisely what you are saying, and as nearly as possible not covering it with your desires. That this is a useful thing, that this is a thing which helps each of us to understand each other, in fact to develop in a way that isn't personally in our own interest, but for the general development of ideas, is a very valuable thing. And so there is, if you will a kind of scientific morality. I believe, hopelessly, that this morality should be extended much more widely; this idea, this kind of scientific morality, that such things as propaganda should be a dirty word. That a description of a country made by the people of another country should describe that country in a disinterested way. ... Advertising, for example, is an example of a scientifically immoral description of the products. This immorality is so extensive that one gets so used to it in ordinary life, that you do not appreciate that it is a bad thing. And I think that one of the important reasons to increase the contact of scientists with the rest of society is to explain, and to kind of wake them up to this permanent attrition of cleverness of the mind that comes from not having information, or not having information always in a form which is interesting.
"Frightening" moral philosopher, Mary Midgley, in her book Science and Poetry (Routledge, 2001) p.84:
Current scientific concepts are not adapted to focusing on subjectivity. Indeed, many of them have been carefully adapted to exclude it, much like cameras with a colour filter. [...] Galileo and Descartes saw how badly the study of objects had been distorted by people who treated these objects as subjects, people who credited things like stones with human purpose and striving. So they ruled that physical science must be objective. And this quickly came to mean, not just that scientists must be fair, but that they should treat everything they studied only as a passive, insentient object.
We know that abstraction made possible three centuries of tremendous scientific advance about physical objects. Today, however, this advance has itself led to a point where consciousness has again to be considered. Enquiries are running against the limits of this narrow focus. In many areas, the advantages of ignoring ourselves have run out.
This has happend most notoriously in quantum mechanics, where physicists have begun to use the idea of an observer quite freely as a casual factor in the events they study. Whether or not this is the best way to interpret quantum phenomena, that development is bound to make people ask what sort of an entity an observer is, since Ocam's Razor has so far failed to get rid of it. This disturbance, however, is only one symptom of a growing pressure on the supposedly subject-proof barrier, a pressure that is due to real growth in all the studies that lie close to it.
A few things are bugging me about contemporary internet interaction. I am really tired of the constant friendly prods and reminders to update software, as my computer chats away with corporations online, trolling for software products, both free and not free but all time-consuming to implement, supposedly on my behalf. Also (and granted this is partly due to human error) I'm sick of inadvertantly clicking on links that are direct to PDF files I really don't want to download. What really ramps up my aggravation is that Adobe Acrobat takes a little while to load and we have to look at this STUPID and insulting graphic the whole time. This dancing guy who is supposed to represent me, the happy user, is more like the assholes who cut me off in their SUVs while I'm riding my bike (and they're talking on their cell phones) than he is like me or anyone I associate with. I guess that just means I'm lucky I don't have to work in an office downtown, but geeze, even on Bay street I'm sure there's some other types of folk using Adobe Acrobat besides slick, trim, self-empowered white guys with their shirts tucked in producing file after file of ugly boring reports and purple bar graphs. Also, what are those cyclindrical things? Slinkys? And, um, nice letter 'A' there. I guess that little item represents both the broad field of typography, layout and design, and the whole line of Adobe products that service that field, and that your computer can constantly remind you to update and upgrade, keeping the brand recognition strong and the user's consumer indentity prepped and fresh for purchase 24-7. Arrrrg.
For a report on last Friday's critical mass in New York City, read this excellent blog post by Stillweride (thanks Rico). Recent events in NYC remind us of the inherent friction between police (historically hired by the state) and common people (historically a threatening faction that those in state control command police to keep in line). The cops have been picking on New York's critical mass ever since the protests there in August. When the cops pick on you, it's not fun. Toronto's critical mass ride has had its share of problems with police as well. For some reason the utterly utopic mandate of the event ("it's just a bike ride") gets under the skin of police-people who seem to want to eradicate (and criminalize) unpredictable behaviour of any kind. It's fair to say, in Toronto anyhow, that simply being a visible minority may more often than not put you on the cop's abornmality radar. It's all inordinately frustrating.
If you are at all interested in the civics of police control, you will very much enjoy Min Sook-Lee's amazing documentary, Hogtown. I just got to see it at the Toronto's most excellent Hot Docs festival. Min Sook-Lee is smart smart smart. She got a film crew into the Police Services Board right at the point when the new mayor of Toronto, David Miller, was elected in November of 2003. It was clear that there was tumult brewing, and indeed the chaos hit just in time for her cameras. The story is about a city council divided between those who want police accountability, and those who want to give cops free reign. In a short space of time there was a smear campaign, exposure of endemic police corruption, unrest about racial profiling, yelling matches about helicopters, blatant disregard for the democratic process, and heroic feats of courage and determination. I have huge respect for Alan Heisey (who I posted about earlier) and councillors Pam McConnell and John Filion who all stuck to their guns despite extraordinary stress levels and the infuriating, babyish behaviour of colleagues such as councillors Case Ootes, Rob Ford, and Giorgio Mammoliti. Even if you aren't involved in local politics, you will find the film to be a nail-biter and a shocking reveal of some elected officials' tenous grasp of democratic principles. The cameras catch everything, from back-room whisperings to full-fledged shouting matches in the council chambers. See it if you get the chance!
Tino took a beautiful photo of his bike and my cat and owl for bike lane diary! I love it.
Rembrandt in New York, by Joanne Tod, 1999. Image from Tod's pages on the CCCA website.
Hospital, by Damien Hirst, 2004. Image from David Cohen's review at artcricial.com.
I saw work from Damien Hirst's painting show (see previous post) projected at a recent symposium. They instantly reminded me of the Canadian painter, Joanne Tod. I've been a big fan of her work since I first saw it in art school, back in the 80s. She has making smart, self conscious ugly/beautiful paintings for a long time. From Tom and Joester's respsonses I get the impression that Hirst's paintings are uglier than Tod's. Tod frequently paints scenes of opulence, and the paint handling itself teeters between lush and downright scratchy. How to position this painting? Is it is a cynical statement about the empty gesture of the "artists hand"? Is it a jab at acquistion and commodity? Or is it simply a grab for those collector dollars? In 2002 Tod put on a show called Vanity Fair, in which she rendered portratis of a bunch of Toronto's big-fish-small-pond personalities as characters from the novel. Shinan Giovanni (then gossip columnist for the National Post) wrote in Lola magazine: "...when Tod confessed that I was to be one of the subjects in her show, I was instantly flattered and made to blush. This, you see, is the power of the portrait artist: the subjects always think they're being made love when, in fact, sometimes they're just being screwed."
The same goes for the art audience when confronted with slick, smart, po-mo painting. Are we being screwed? If we are, maybe we like it? It's odd that Damien Hirst has chosen to replay this dynamic in paint, where the epitomes of market cynicism and self-reference have been visited and revisited thoroughly over the past 20 years. In this context, I understand Kimmelman's "moral scold" (as Tom called it in yesterday's comment thread). Granted, Hirst's subject matter speaks to a contemporary level of desperate detachment. But besides offering a historyical study of postmodernism-in-paint, what could Hirst be possibly saying with this treatment other than, simply, "buy this painting"?
On the other hand, maybe it is possible that ironic reference can fold so many times as to compact itself back into sincerity. If there is a contemporary youthful art market really interested in "earnestness, or at least the appearance of it" as Kimmelman suggests, and Hirst can deliver, then what's the problem? Are you "shallow and money-obessed" if you enjoy a painterly painting of a dissected brain, or a morgue, or a bleeding soccer hooligan? Or are you just a reader of magazines, watcher of television shows, disempowered and subjugated protestor of wars, believer that church and state should remain separated, post-AI-proto-cyborgian internet user, in short...an understandably depressed and yet participating member of contemporary western culture?