Text for Outsourced

Theme: Inclusive and Exclusive Art


(text based on content of catalogue for The Armory Show 2006, New York)


1.


Martin Heidegger famously asks, "What is a jug?"



He answers:


It is a vessel, of the kind that holds something within it. The jug's holding is done by the base and sides. This container itself can be held by the handle. As a vessel, the jug is something self-sustained, something that stands on its own. The potter makes the jug out of clay that he has specially chosen and prepared for it. The jug consists of that clay...




He asserts:


We become aware of the vessel's holding nature when we fill the jug. The base and sides obviously take on the task of holding. These are what is impermeable in the vessel. But it is not what is impermeable that does the holding. When we fill the jug, the emptiness, the void, within it is what does the holding. This space, this nothing, is what the jug is as a holding vessel.





He deduces:

But if the holding is done by the jug's void, then the potter who forms the vessel's base and sides on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug: from start to finish, he shapes not the clay but the void, bringing it forth as the container in the shape of the holding vessel. The jug's character does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.




He declares:


Physical science assures us that the jug is filled with air, and with everything that goes to make up the air's mixture. We are misled when we point to the void of the jug in order to define its acting as a container. When we pour wine into the jug, the air that already fills the jug is simply displaced by a liquid. Considered scientifically, to fill a jug means to exchange one filling for another...



He inquires:


Is this reality the jug?


What is the jug's nature?


How does the jug's void hold?


By the taking and keeping of what was poured in?




He concludes:


This twofold holding is gathered into the outpouring, which first constitutes the full presence of giving: the poured gift. The jug’s jug-character consists in the poured gift of the pouring out. In the poured gift, the jug presences as jug – it gathers what belongs to giving: the container, the void, the outpouring.




2.



Is the jug the clay that excludes, the void that includes, or a relation between the two that is completed through the function of outpouring?



Through Heidegger's audacious reworking of categories, the limited, ordinary object suddenly becomes extraordinary, an expression of infinitude, particularly through the suggestion of generosity – “the poured gift” – that also may be unbounded in its resonances.




Perhaps only the jug-maker's hand and the philosopher's eye can negotiate this stunning rhetorical conversion of the physical into the metaphysical, but neither hand nor eye may have the answer to the question of what an object truly is. Where are we to look for the jug, if we accept Heidegger's deconstruction of the material premise of the object, and with this, the simultaneous deconstruction of the spatial premise of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, inclusion and exclusion, inner and outer, interiority and exteriority?




Reflecting upon the way a "natural" object is thus radically denaturalized, we are forced to relinquish our conditioned assumptions about shape, form, meaning, function. But radical shifts in context can denaturalize the "natural" as immediately and effectively as any material reworkings of the object.




What happens when ordinary objects (such as a jug) that are "inclusive" (i.e., that are found everywhere as an intrinsic part of our pragmatic, gritty, daily life, objects perhaps as useful and familiar to us as our own bodies, objects that bind us to them and urge us to stay bound) are moved into "exclusive" gallery environs and "artistically" prepared, arranged and installed for specific kinds of viewing?





Does this act of "exclusion" from their typical, ordinary contexts make these ordinary objects atypical, extraordinary, estranged, dissociated, almost liminal, like Heidegger"s jug that is neither form nor void?





Does the viewer then become estranged from his/her own prior "inclusive" knowledge of that now-exclusive object?


What do such once-‘inclusive’ art objects become, if they are no longer what they were?



Has their function changed, from the utilitarian to something other than this?


>
If so, what is their purpose?




Are they intended to be beautiful?




Are they beautiful?




If so, what constitutes their beauty?



If the objects under consideration, whether beautiful or otherwise, purposive or otherwise, are no longer in the category of "inclusive" or "exclusive", where are they to be found, what is their context, their location?




3.


"That is beautiful which gives us pleasure without interest," muses Immanuel Kant, visionary of the absolute.




He is standing in the John Connelly Gallery in New York, observing Scott Treleaven's Hive (2005), watercolor on paper, 12.25 x 7 inches. Against the blurred backdrop of a honeycomb are painted large gold and white chrysanthemums, and the sharp tips of a few green leaves. Full-blown corollas fringe the upper frame, pushing into the space. The partially nude figure of a youth, rendered in chiaroscuro halftones, occupies the center of the painting. He holds drapery against his lower body, right hip and upper thigh exposed. Half his face and torso are in dense shadow. An inscription garlands his neck; the French word sans can be deciphered below fragile collarbones and the hollow at the base of the throat. Tattoos flow along the youth’s arm, claim his shoulder. Within the three-layered, spiked aureole that radiates around his head, his hair is disheveled as if he has been roused from deep sleep, and is still drenched in the ache of a sorrowful dream. A few large bees emerging from the petals above hover around him; one bee, perhaps a precursor of the swarm, has settled on the drapery's thick folds. The youth's direct, aloof gaze offers nothing but itself. He is simply there, revealed and concealed, vulnerable, immaculate; an alluring, indifferent, beautiful, solitary stamen.




"The delight which we connect with the representation of the real existence of an object is called interest. Such a delight, therefore, always involves a reference to the faculty of desire, either as its determining ground, or as necessarily implicated with its determining ground," Kant reminds himself. "But if the question is whether something is beautiful, one does not want to know whether there is anything that is or that could be at stake, for us or for someone else, in the existence of the thing, but rather how we judge it in mere contemplation"”




He reminds himself that the viewing subject's aesthetic responses to the represented object should ideally be detached, impersonal.





He reminds himself that the beauty of the appraised object should be judged solely with regard to its pure form, unconnected to any notion of its utilitarian function or purpose, and removed from any consideration regarding its actual existence.




He asks himself whether the represented object’s relationship to "reality" is to be understood as irrelevant.




He asks himself if subjective pleasure in the beautiful is a response to the manner of representation, and to that alone.




He wonders what kind of knowledge of the object we come to, if the representation is not to be judged in the context of any "reality".




He wonders about the purpose of such awareness...




Immanuel Kant gazes past the figure in Hive (2005) to its ground, the waxy wall of hexagons where honey is sweetening. He surrenders to the subtle glories of tessellation, seen in the perfected design of the cells of the comb, the lattice of the snow crystal, the grid of pomegranate seeds...




He murmurs his favourite line from the open letter to Galileo Galilei by Johannes Kepler, son of a mercenary soldier and an innkeeper's daughter, excommunicated father of nine, his ear tuned to astral chords, his thought ravished by "disinterested" observations of the immutable laws that rule the close packing of equal spheres and determine the foci of elliptical orbits:




"Geometria una et aeterna est in mente Dei refulgens; cuius consortium hominibus tributum inter causas est, cur homo sit imago Dei" (Geometry is one and eternal, shining in the mind of God; that share in it is accorded to men is one of the reasons that man is an image of God)...



He recalls the words carved on Kepler's tombstone: Mensus eram coleus, nunc terrae metior umbras / Mens coelestis erat, corporis umbra jacet (I used to measure the heavens, now I measure the shadows of earth / The mind belonged to heaven, the body’s shadow lies here).



He recalls the sentence carved on his own: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me" ”



He recalls the rest of the statement:



“…The first perspective of a countless multitude of worlds as it were annihilates my importance as an animal creature, which must give the matter out of which it has grown back to the planet (a mere speck in the cosmos) after it has been (one knows not how) furnished with life-force for a short time. The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth, as an intelligence, through my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the entire world of the senses, at least so far as may be judged from the purposive determination of my existence through this law, which is not limited to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaches into the infinite...";



He recalls Kepler's description of how the motion of a planet defines its sphere:



"... and thus it comes about gradually by the linking and accumulation of a great many revolutions that a kind of concave sphere is displayed, having the same center as the Sun, just as by a great many circles of silken thread, linked with each other and wound together, the dwelling of a silkworm is made..."



He reminds himself that he too, with a logician's rigorous kindness, has consoled those in need of other or further certainties, through a similar proclamation:



"Perpetual peace is ensured by nothing less than that great artist nature, whose mechanical process makes her purposiveness visibly manifest, permitting harmony to emerge among men through their discord, even against their will."


4.




In search of beauty, or perhaps in search of disinterestedness, Herman Melville enters the Kurimanzutto Gallery in Mexico City. From lobe to lobe of his exhausted brain surges an object that from the time of its inscription has stubbornly refused to drown:




"The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulcher; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insensate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast, white, headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rood that it floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls augment the murderous din. For hours and hours, from the almost stationary ship, that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, the great mass of death floats on and on, until lost in infinite perspectives."




Melville stops in front of an exhibit by Damián Ortega: Moby Dick (2004). This is a large photograph of a participatory, "inclusive" installation, an artwork with the potential to be always in process, shot in an underground parking garage. The empty area next to pillar 13-G has been cordoned off. Behind the tape stand a crowd of spectators, cheering, clapping, recording the scene on video. A white Volkswagen is parked inside a painted circle. A rope tied to the rear fender leads from the car into the hands of a man at a short distance from the circle, and then trails out of the frame. The man's straining body leans back as he pulls on the rope, trying to get the car to move.





Staring at the rope, Melville remembers:





"The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In length the common Sperm Whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub…so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded ‘sheaves’, or layers of concentric spiralisations, without any hollow but the ‘heart’, or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody’s arm, leg or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub…





“Thus, the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions…When the line is darting out, to be seated in the boat is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam and shaft and wheel is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other without the slightest warning…




“Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophecies of the storm is perhaps more awful than the storm itself, for indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm and contains it in itself; as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder and the ball and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play – this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”




Gazing at Moby Dick (2004), Melville searches – for pleasure, for purpose, for the stunning power of his symbol. Where are they, in this representation?




Then he picks up the rope, suddenly finds what he has been seeking: the understanding that his “outpouring”, the “full presence” of his “poured gift”, his exclusive, classic original text, will always be in process – it is of such extraordinary generosity that it includes all potential derivatives in all their necessary allegorical manifestations – the ordinary, the ironic, the grotesque, the contingent, the absurd.





5.



In search of disinterestedness, or perhaps in search of beauty, Soetsu Yanagi enters the Taka Ishii gallery in Tokyo. He stops in front of an exhibit by Kei Takemura. Renovated Café-au-Lait Bowl (2003); broken café-au-lait bowl, Italian synthetic fabric, Japanese silk thread, adhesive, 8.3 x 14.5 cm.



But the connoisseur of studio ceramics and founder of the contemporary folk crafts/arts movement in Japan cannot identify where the large white china object is flawed, or what defect, crack, or chip has been repaired, as the bowl’s void is draped with cloth and sealed off. Observing this aesthetic revocation of the object's capacity to hold, to pour, to give, Yanagi's curatorial sensibility is overwhelmed with a yearning for what he has supported all his life: mingei, folk art products, including the earthenware made in large quantities for daily use by the people; commonplace, dependable, convenient, sturdy; honest, healthy forms created without ambition and self-imposition…



Only mingei has the intrinsic capacity to sustain affection, he reminds himself. True mingei is a true companion for life.




Then he recalls the seventh rule prescribed by Sen no Rikyu, honored master of cha-no-oyu, the Tea Ceremony: "Give those with whom you find yourself every consideration."




He recalls the other six rules to be followed in the tearoom:


> lay the charcoal so that the water boils



> arrange the flowers as they are in the field



> in the summer suggest coolness



> in the winter suggest warmth



> do everything ahead of time



> prepare for rain



He recalls two infinitely consoling, infinitely disturbing assurances by this master exclusively committed to inclusion:



"The Way of Tea is naught but this: first you boil water, then you make the tea and drink it."

"Though many people drink tea, if you do not know the Way of Tea, tea will drink you up."



Yanagi recalls the red and black raku teabowls the master loved, the work of his Korean friend Sasaki Chojiro, originally a decorative tile-maker, who created the style of austere monochromatic vessels hand-formed to the master's specifications.




He recalls a declaration by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the daimyo Rikyu served as Tea Master and advisor, who erected a teahouse plated with gold leaf that could be folded up and moved about, even while Rikyu practiced within his four-mat thatched hut: "When tea is made with water drawn from the depths of mind, whose bottom is beyond measure, we really have what is called cha-no-oyu."




He recalls Rikyu's death poem, composed prior to his ritual suicide ordered by Hideyoshi, who had become resentful of the master's popularity and was angered by Rikyu's refusal to allow his daughter to be taken as the daimyo's concubine: "I raise the sword/ this sword of mine/ long in my possession/ The time is come at last/ Skyward I throw it up!"




Yanagi reconstructs the death scene, reminding himself that seppuku was a key part of the samurai warrior's code…With his selected attendant (usually a friend, but sometimes a victorious opponent wanting to honour the bravery of his rival) standing by, the warrior would open his kimono, take his knife, plunge it into his abdomen – first making a left-to-right cut, and then a second, slightly upward cut to spill out the intestines. On the second cut, the attendant would perform a sword-stroke in which the warrior was all but decapitated. A slight bit of flesh was left attaching the head to the body, so that the head would not fly off in the direction of the verifying officials.



Yanagi reminds himself that the warrior would have agreed in advance when the attendant would act, usually as soon as the knife was plunged into the abdomen.




He reminds himself that the sword was discarded after the ceremony, and that it was considered ill-omened by samurai to be requested to be a seppuku attendant – one gained no fame if the job was done well, and if by chance the attendant blundered, it became a lifetime disgrace.



He reminds himself that because of the unflinching, unveering precision required for such a maneuver, the attendant was usually a skilled swordsman.




He reminds himself of the disinterested grip on the knife, the disinterested grip on the sword...




He reminds himself of the raku method: creating a particular strength through thermal shock, taking vessels from the kiln while red hot and plunging them directly into water to cool.



He recites the question asked of all tea drinkers by the sublimely disinterested Rikyu: “Though you wipe your hands and brush off the dust and dirt from the vessels, what is the use of all this fuss if the heart is still impure?”




Yanagi walks through the gallery, gazes at the exhibits: “This one is made by a person with too much tea within; this one is made by a person with too little tea, this one by a person with no tea at all…and this one by a person with just enough...”




He reminds himself that true beauty is experienced only when beauty observes beauty, not when ‘I’ observe ‘it’...




He recalls what he has written, as a curator/critic, about certain objects he deeply loves, inclusive Korean Yi dynasty earthenware, vessels characterized by the disinterested hand/eye of their anonymous makers: “To apply to this pottery the criteria of beauty and ugliness, skill and awkwardness, etc., makes no sense. The pieces assume no pretensions; they are simply there, in all their naturalness, looking as if they would like to say to ingenious modern artists, ‘There is nothing we want. Come and join us. Everybody will be saved.’”


Smriti Vohra, India March 2006