He labeled performances "opaque" when
the spectator had difficulty seeing beyond
the surface/convention/form, or perhaps
when the piece was about the
surface/convention/form.
Anyway, obviously I'm drawn toward the opaque.
Which is what you keep drawings us toward in
these conversations, right?
Dear G____.
Etymologically INERT literally means not
art. Un-art, say, which supports the inertia
and the always necessary status quo.
ERT, on the other hand (art), if we’re “pure”
in our distinction (let’s be academic for a
moment) would feel like holy hell, apocalypse
now, big bad wolf, the stranger, joker,
inert convention.
I like setting up the opposition as polarized
extremes—hostile and incommensurate, so
THEN a consideration of relationship and
dialectical synthesis might emerge.
I’m a sucker for conversation—I admit it,
though the more I push for it, the more
it blows away.. Chasing a balloon..
Conversation is normally considered
instrumental: trade and exchange and
blow-it-off expression too.
But conversation-for-conversation’s sake is
the liberal art (I use that designation loosely,
to stand for all that is good-for-good’s sake in
the whirl): It’s DIFFERENT than conversation
for getRdone.
Different in kind, different in values.…
For one thing: converse-action ( I call it that,
hoping it may gain status close to all the other
action we salute around here: work-action,
service-action….) generates what Lou Weber
and the biologists call emerging phenomena.
Stuff rises up as a result of the back & forth
which doesn’t emerge when the conversation is
essentially instrumental.
The possibility of News out of Noise.
(Steven Pinker says every utterance has 2 agendae:
the obviously utilitarian one & the hidden one which
he calls Negotiating Relationship. That second
agenda can barely be talked about—seeing as the
first pretty much eclipses it, non-transparently
transparent.)
Our (X) fix-it and housekeeping duties, taking
care of this business and (Z) relationship:
strokes and status, fitting in and not so much—an
embarrassment: (Y) the gap and cognitive/affective
dissonance between these two levels: surface and
deep ecologic, say.
How to do justice to all 3—that triad? Well, I call that
the “liberal art”—but I need help, that’s for sure. What
I’m talking about always eclipses what I’m talking about:
IT’s kind of like the forest and trees conundrum:
General Truth and the Devils in the Details.
My Attention Efficiency at the cost a
of My Attention Deficit—
like that.
It takes a fine artist who can negotiate transparent
transparency as well as non-transparent transparency
and, of course, transparent non-transparency &
non-transparent non-transparency, and not many
have the stomach for it.
Usually a sustained converse-action serves to work out
all the kinks & level jumps so that the players (assuming
they are agree-able) end on the same page as it were—
mix of metaforce notwithstanding and actually
necessary to the venture.
xxxooo, Sam
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