Randy Lee Cutler

I am scheduled to give a talk at the Vancouver Art Gallery On April 23 for their exhibition Visceral Bodies. I am quite excited about this. In fact my awareness of this show inspired me to design an Modern Art History course at ECU called Metaphorical Bodies. I have wanted to teach a class on metaphor for a while and this wants an excellent opportunity. I did inform my students on the first day that the title of the course might not fully capture the curriculum and that we would have to revisit it at the end of the course. At this point we have considered the general properties of metaphor, the operative trope of digestion in my own research, allegory, the visceral eye and the oral logics of the museum. This week we will be examining figurations as a framing metaphor in the work of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and of course visual examples in modern and contemporary art. Next week is our final reading and theme which looks at cannibalism and psychoanalytic identification.

I was hoping for the class to visit the exhibition at the VAG sooner rather than later but the Olympics made a journey to the gallery prohibitive. We will be checking out the show at the end of the month when things have settled down a bit in the city. Below are some examples of figurations of bodily (and visceral) forms.

Frida Kahlo The Little Deer 1946

Zhang Huan My New York 2002

(left, Michale Lin A Modest Veil 2010)

1. A friend told me something interesting about this public  artwork.  She said that the title of Michael Lin’s 6,000-square-foot, hand-painted mural, A Modest Veil is a reference to Asterix , a series of French comic books written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo. According to her telling instead of visualizing a violent scene in a story the books would show a page with the same pattern as Lin’s mural. Goscinny would call this ruse ‘a modest veil.’ As hard as I try I can find no information coupling Lin’s work to the Asterix comics whether through the same imagery or the phrase ‘a modest veil’. And the Vancouver Art Gallery’s website only celebrates Lin’s use of patterns based on traditional Taiwanese textiles. Perhaps the idea of concealment in the Asterix series is doubled and therefore hidden in this art work where the floral motif/modest veil becomes a shroud for what can not or should not be represented.

While it sounds like apocrypha the telling may be instructive. What is particularly interesting in light of the city’s current festivities is that my friend  recounted this to me on the evening of February 12, after returning from demonstrating along with approximately 4,000 other people who assembled in front of Lin’s veil to protest the Vancouver Winter Olympics and poverty in the city. Here the mostly peaceful protesters gathered against the curtain of brightly colored Taiwanese designs and, perhaps, a visual metaphor for the unrepresentable.

(Click on this image and you can read the text on this protest banner which was a different event from the demonstration described above.)

2. The second strange thing is the news that a Sami (indigenous) shaman in Norway has suggested aboriginal people in B.C. might have cast an evil spell on the Nordic country’s Olympic athletes because of their opposition to Norwegian-owned fish farming operations in B.C.! Norwegian media have noted that several B.C. chiefs did stage a 29-hour hunger strike this week to protest the 29 Norwegian-owned fish farms in the Musgamagw Tsawataineuk Tribal Council’s territories, located in an Archipelago north of Vancouver. One of the hunger strikers Chief Bob Chamberlin has said, “If I did possess such a power, I don’t think I would be directing it at the Norwegian national sportsmen. I think I would direct it towards the fish farms.” Certainly a better and more efficient use of local magic. Perhaps a savvy journalist should interview Sumi the shapeshifting Olympic mascot to get the hidden scoop on this news item.

Downtown (above), Chinatown (below)

Spring has sprung, the grass is growing, the birds are in the air…

Strange Days in Vancouver, BC.

The world has descended upon us and while it appears to be superficially pretty, it really isn’t pretty at all. The city is under siege by the temporary autonomous zone of the IOC, VANOC and the corporate elite who drive through our barricaded streets on roads  reserved just for them. Meanwhile my regular bike route, along False Creek and past the Olympic Village, is now forbidden to all regular commuters for two months.  Terminal city has come down with a fever. Fans, local and visitors alike, happily walk through rainy streets and shop for mementos; official hockey sticks, red polyester mittens, commemorative pins and of course the trio of mascots Miga, Sumi and Quatchi.

Even as 1 billion is being spent on security, 300 million on the opening ceremonies and 120 million on the Whistler Nordic centre to name a few of the higher price tags,  $130,000 has been cut from sports programs and $110 million in facility grants, which are used for the physical upkeep of schools. It doesn’t make sense. City Hall recently has sent letters to 800 teachers warning of possible layoffs in May as the district tries to balance its 2010-11 budget. And of course there are the cuts to Arts funding in the province something like 85% – 92% through 2012.

As I write, I hear helicopters circling the city perhaps looking for rogues protesters, mapping crowds or simply enjoying the view from above and wonder whether we have lost the plot. Locally, Nationally, Globally. Don’t get me wrong. I am proud to be Canadian and generally happy here in lotus land. But the newly sprouting daffodils and irises portend something more eerie than an early west coast spring. A surreal quality wafts through the air bringing with it dancing sasquatch, snowsurfing sea bears and shapshifting thunderbirds.

CODE Dialogues – A one day symposium on the role of digital practices
Feb 6, 2010,  10:30- 7:00 PM
Emily Carr University
1399 Johnston Street
Vancouver BC

CODE Dialogues is part of a larger series of events that include exhibitions at Emily Carr University’s two campuses (Granville Island and Great Northern Way).  On Saturday February 6, 2010  from 5:30-7:00 PM I will be a moderating a panel called Organic Technologies. The speakers/artists include: Anais met det Ancxt, Joanna Berzowska, Galen Scorer, Jer Thorpe and Brendan Wypich

Learning from Vancouver – Exhibition and Symposium
The Western Front, 303 East 8th Avenue, Vancouver, BC

Learning from Vancouver includes an exhibition by Bik Van der Pol and a live conversation about Vancouver and its image. On Sunday January 31 I will be a respondent on the panel with Urban subjects, Am Johal + Fiona Jeffries. This keynote presentation is at 2:00 PM. My response is at 3:30 PM.

My colleague Duane Elverum has initiated a new project at the University.

Atmosphere is a sustainability research project being carried out at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. It uses the interview as a way to explore the issues of social sustainability within groups and proposes that this might be enhanced by close listening as a way to know each other and our work.

I am the first interview subject. Check it out here ATMOSPHERE!

The elephant in the room is an effective figuration for thinking about truth telling. (This is the subject of a forum: Speaking Truth to Reconciliation that I am participating in this weekend.) This image points to what is not being said, and whether there are obvious truths that are being ignored or going unaddressed. While the idiomatic expression applies to an obvious problem no one wants to discuss, it is also about taking note of the atmosphere in the room and acting in reciprocity with it.

(Image: Maurizio Cattelan Not Afraid of Love, 2000 )

Elephants communicate through snorts, trumpeting and croaking sounds. The rumbles that an elephant produces are usually too low in pitch for humans to hear, about twenty hertz, but to other elephants, they sound like lively conversation. Researchers believe that elephants use these infrasonic growls to communicate over long distances, perhaps as far as six miles. Elephants also send messages through the ground to each other. I wonder whether these underground and subterranean messages might be thought of as counter publics, voices that are often, though not always, below the radar. Many artists, curators and critics are engaged in a hybrid model informed by almost secretive, counter-pubic manifestations, distributed events and counter-mediums in response to the homogenizing effects of the mass media. According to Sven Lutticken in his essay “Secrecy and Publicity: Reactivating the Avant-Garde”, a counter public is “an audience that to some extant has a subordinated social status, and is critical of mainstream media and the prevailing ideology”.

One of the key characteristics of Speaking Truth to Reconciliation is a commitment to generosity and generous interactions, which is extended to intellectual thought. Often, criticality translates as a hard-edged authority and rigidity rather than a dynamic dialogue that adapts to participants and context. How do we navigate and hear what another says without responding exclusively to highly charged emotions or personal politics? What does it mean to take on this role and how does it affect transformation both for the speaker and the audience?

Speaking truth is one thing. Doing this with a commitment to generosity, truthfulness, and reconciliation means taking one’s time in how ideas and feelings are put into words. Zen monk and poet Norman Fisher’s own practice attempts to speak truth with generosity. “This raises the question of how we speak the truth — skillfully or unskillfully, thoroughly or with only a few details, kindly or not so kindly, at the right time or at the wrong time. In what style and at what pace do we communicate this version of the truth? With what attitude and tone of voice? All of these factors make more of a difference than you might think, not just in style but in substance.”

Ganesh is one of the best-known and most widely worshipped deities in the Hindu pantheon. Ganesh is the God of knowledge, remover of obstacles through moving forward but also the creator of obstacles. He is worshipped, and remembered in the beginning of any auspicious performance for blessings and auspiciousness. He is the Lord of New Beginnings.

Last week’s class on Gender and Phenomenology went quite well. I was surprised with how in tune students were with the assigned reading, Judith Butler’s  “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988). Perhaps her ideas have been repeatedly performed and reconstituted since the initial publication to the point where the concept ‘gender is a performance’ meets little resistance.  I also realized in class last week that even though the course is on Modern Art, relating the content to the contemporary context really resonates for the students and activates modernism. As art students at an art and design university, they are more susceptible to the contemporary than the modern.  Teaching Modern Art history through the lens of the present allows the original work to generate and accrue meaning across time and up to the present moment.

We looked at work by Marcel Duchamp, Claude Cahun, Frida Kahlo and Adrian Piper.

At present I am attempting to reconcile gender with phenomenology which appears to be a complex intersection of conventional philosophy and post-structuralist thought. In a sense Butler’s essay below reconciles the assertion of essential Being with the dynamism of lived experience. Apparently phenomenology can extend its analysis to the question of gender through a radical revision of its founding precepts. I am along for the ride.

Excerpt from Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988)

Philosophers rarely think about acting in the theatrical sense, but they do have a discourse of “acts” that maintains associative semantic meanings with theories of performance and acting. For example, John Searle’s “speech acts,” those verbal assurances and promises which seem not only to refer to a speaking relationship, but to constitute a moral bond between speakers, illustrate one of the illocutionary gestures that constitutes the stage of the analytic philosophy of language. Further, “action theory,” a domain of moral philosophy, seeks to understand what it is “to do” prior to any, claim of what one ought to do. Finally, the phenomenological theory of “acts,” espoused by Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and George Herbert Mead, among others, seeks to explain the mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality, through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign. Though phenomenology sometimes appears to assume the existence of a choosing and constituting agent prior to language (who poses as the sole source of its constituting acts), there is also a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts.