thiscrapbook

[thiscrapbook]

Het probleem zit niet in de verkeerde regels, maar hoe de bureaucrateie is georganiseerd. En de Nederlandse moraal van 'mensen moeten hun gedrag maar eens gaan aanpassen' is poepduur.

[thiscrapbook]

As the late political scientist Herbert Simon astutely observed, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”5 In an economy premised upon speed and saturation, it’s not connoisseurship or judgement critics have to offer but a more precious resource. What the critic has to give is the fruits of looking laggardly, an attention that appears in increasingly lesser quantities today, a long and sustained commitment to coaxing meaning from mute objects. Though we “pay” attention, our attention need not be regulated by the industrial logic of clock time. What the critic has to offer is her own subjectivity, her own careful, glacial experience of a work of art, especially ones that do not immediately break open to the spectator’s gaze. I believe this type of slow looking restores both art and viewer to the gift economy, an economy that Lewis Hyde has said is governed not by the logos of the marketplace but eros, an economy of reciprocity and mutual exchange.6 Indeed, the word “attention” comes to us from the Latin attendre, which literally means to stretch towards something, that reach for the space outside the self that forms the basis of kinship. Where logos alienates, eros brings near. So perhaps the role of the critic is this: to attend-by-proxy for the public.

[thiscrapbook]

On spatial politics and artistic research

[thiscrapbook]

Artists, like gardeners digging their fingers into the earth, plant seeds in the soil of society, from which new landscapes emerge. People grow along with these landscapes, embodying change arising from shared imagination. From this embodiment flows the collective expression of new structures and perspectives. Meanwhile, we keep our eyes fixed on how we ideally want to see and experience the world.

Tina Lenz in Radical Imagination: An exploration of social art practices

[thiscrapbook]

The modern day structures of capitalist patriarchy function similarly to the Old Testament God, setting traps for us that cruelly test our ‘resilience’ and faith, itself remaining invisible to us. With no thing or no one to point the finger at we instead point at ourselves and each other to seek explanation, blame, vengeance.

[thiscrapbook]