Sunday, March 08, 2015

I love my hands and want to keep functional every freaking finger and my opposables for these are my assets that render me recognizably human, well at least semi-hairless primate.

I love my hands and want to keep functional every freaking finger and my opposables for these are my assets that render me recognizably human, well at least semi-hairless primate. And, though I also love the scholarly thing, I miss using my hands gnarly and exhaustively each day.



THE SHORT VERSION of a smidgen of the remembered

I sat in a waiting room, not one I had been in before. With my head slightly tilted I watched the man five seats down on my left. He was clean cut, dark haired, casual but well dressed, perhaps twenty-five. He flipped through the slick pages of a magazine. Something seemed not quite right. I was fixed on his hands when it dawned on me that his fingers were toes.
The uniform loss of digits on both hands seemed suggestive of machine precision, an industrial accident. The expletive fingers still absent, the others had been adapted from his big toes and its second. The pointer toe digit and his opposable toes, now thumbs, flipped pages. No redness, residual mangling or scar. The fat pads of the toes had diminished with their changed use. Perhaps he now balances with upon his feet with little toe prosthetics. 




The teenage boy seated next to me interrupted my stare as he leaned nearer to me. I turned noting the professionally bandages wrapped on each wrist. Nodding down with an ask, almost boastful he exclaimed how he hadn't cut deep enough when he tried to kill himself, but instead had severed and damaged both nerves and tendons. It was a unexpected disclosure. His mother sat with her head down, jaw and body tight. A bodily gesture I recognized as agonized anger and shame. I neither wanted to reward the boy's boastful call for attention nor judge him harshly with my bodily attentions. So, I attempted gentle eye contact and nods as he talked and I listened.



The door opposite the check-in sliding window, the exit from which I had entered, opened. A woman was rolled in a wheelchair, she was situated and parked. The roller bent and said something quietly in her ear and then departed. Each of her arms, parallel and fully extended forward, were splinted and freshly bandaged. Both of her legs where like wise encased and extended. All four limbs shot out straight forward as if frozen in the act of warding off the impact of an oncoming car. Her entry left the room very silent as the toe-fingered man, the wrist-sliced teen, the angry mom and myself tried not to full on stare. 




The door, adjacent to the window, cracked opened, my name was called. I was lead to room five, the door shut as I waited to meet with my hand neurosurgeon. I’d with met him once before during my six hour ER visit, not in a waiting room but behind curtain number three, where I chattered scatologically, nervously,  incessantly for my full stay. It was my form of deflection while my finger was prepped with a digital block (a freaking long needle stuck in my fingers crouch between two and three) and the surgeon scrubbed its INSIDE. OMG, having the inside of your own body scrubbed is a thousand kinds of wrong, no matter that you can't feel it. Finally I was carefully stitched up, wrinkle by wrinkle aligned. All the while, two chain saw accident workers, who'd bounced the rotating teeth off their shins, apparently a common accident, waited. And I listened as the one covered gurney was extricated with each curtain being shut sequentially and its sound announcing the dead body's passing.




Sure, I had twenty-two stitches zipping up my recessive index finger, not toe, to pull things back together from the inadvertent butterfly fillet resulting from wrestling with my black gator,* but I was pretty sure my finger would be fine. I hadn't cross cut my tendons and nerves, just sliced up the middle of them from my nailed tip to knuckle, exposing the bone. Sigh, though if you pinch the back of your finger, you'll see this did not involve a lot of hurt, just OMG, I see my bones. 

I had never consciously considered before that I should probably seriously protect my hands and fingers, for they are dear assets. That my eight digits, two opposables, and language make me uniquely operationally as human had previously gone unthunk (yes). It was only sitting in the  waiting room witnessing a single day in the office of a hand neurosurgeon that these thoughts surfaced to my consciousness.



And I wasn't even sculptress yet! But, it was my pre-lesson in noncommercial tool safety before I owned a table saw, bandsaw, miter saw, chop saw, jigsaw, circular saw. 




I love my hands and want to keep functional every freaking finger and my opposables for these are my assets that render me recognizably human, well at least semi-hairless primate.




* gator = gatorboard = a type of foamcore with a thin sheath of bulsa wood in it; my blade = exacto knife; and the bite = slippage while running its blade along a metal ruler's edge and inadvertently up my index finger.  Slicing the back of your finger actually doesn't hurt (go ahead pinch the back of your finger...nada). Only three things hurt: 1. when they vigorously scrubbed INSIDE my finger (WTHeck..seriously no one should scrub under your skin!!!), the digital block (the needle they stick between your fingers and then twist around injecting the deadening) and OT sessions.



Photograph by Katy Anderson



Tuesday, March 03, 2015

[performative utterance] + [prostituted prop] + [performative principles] = art as research [SITE}





A long time ago I got in the habit, never since broken, of writing down things instead of talking. It is possible that I was lead into art making because talking and being in the presence of another person were not requirements. — Robert Morris, 2013 [Lecture @ University of Chicago] 
Robert Morris’ artistic praxis finds ground in art as research. In this vein, his substantial body of work exhibits a thoughtful exploration of the art object as performative, the viewer’s position as interventional, and the thought theme, agency, called into question. It seems a logical intent to unpack how these explorations of the performative, intervention, and agency via his use of substitution, imitation and exchange are evident in his performance, Site (1964). Additionally, his praxis and resultant works fluidly cross genre boundaries between sculpture, performance, dance, text, criticism, and art history in a way that disrupts the regulatory fiction of disciplinary coherence.

I am not yet ready to throw down the gauntlet of a definitive argument, but the above paragraph is the direction I am heading. Though if I must throw down a specific gauntlet, it will be that Robert Morris’ artistic praxis and resultant works fluidly cross genre boundaries between sculpture, performance, dance, text, criticism, and art history in a way that disrupts the regulatory fiction of disciplinary coherence. Of course, I totally stole this and repurposed it from Judith Butler’s constitutive notion of gender coherence. I have simply overlaid it relative to disciplinary coherence. Perhaps this makes Robert Morris’ praxis less inter-disciplinary and more transGENRE*. Ha. I will have to reread Butler [Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory] to see if it is a fit. Could be an interesting part of the argument, since Greenbergian Modernism is so freaking patriarchal, isolates the genre’s as uniquely discrete, and Morris pushed up against this in his praxis and essays.
A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy. — Henri Poincare, 1902
The abolition of logic, the dance of the impotents of creation! — Dada Manifesto, 1918
Illogical judgments lead to new experience. — Sol LeWitt, 1969
*Abstract Appendix TRANSGENRE [stolen from Wikipedia and shoved through the notions of Judith Butler | italics denote my word substitutions]

  1.  Of, relating to, or designating a practice whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of genre disciplinarity, but combines or moves between these.
  2. Practices who were assigned a disciplinary genre, usually at birth and based on their physiological neural activation, but who feel that this is a false or incomplete description of themselves.
  3. Non-identification with, or non-presentation as, the genre (and assumed genre) one was assigned at birth.
  4. A transgenre practices may have characteristics that are normally associated with a particular discipline and identify elsewhere on the traditional genre continuum, or exist outside of it as other, agenregenre neutral, genre ueer, non-binary, third genre  etc. Transgenre practices may also identify as bigenre, pangenre, or along several places on either the traditional transgenre continuum or the more encompassing continuums that have been developed in response to recent, significantly more detailed studies. Furthermore, many transgenre practices experience a period of identity development that includes better understanding one’s self-image, self-reflection, and self-expression. More specifically, the degree to which individuals feel genuine, authentic, and comfortable within their external appearance and accept their genuine identity is referred to as transgenre congruence. 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender]

Footnotes later...assume ideas are being borrowed and mashed together.

Sunday, March 01, 2015

Judith Butler and transGENRE (ha)

Just playing with labels and understanding the fluidity of the less than fixed disciplines within the academy.

I don’t care for the term interdisciplinary. It is too loose, too overused and misused. It also infers a dividedness. An interdisciplinary artist would appear to dip her toe in discrete finite disciplinary pools; but this seems not quit accurate. Artists, the list to numerous to list, that are prolific in production, persistent in practice through life, and are known not just locally but more globally, tend to have a transgenre practice (even if what is publicly presented is mongenred). Like life and practice, the lines become blurry in their fictions.

At first with the unpacking of Butler’s notions of the constitutive nature of gender, I transferred it the nature of interdisciplarity as a kind of transgenre practice. So I move from Butler’s transgendered people to transGENRE practices.

TRANSGENRE [stolen and morphed from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender]

  1. Of, relating to, or designating a practice whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of genre or disciplinary roles, but combines or moves between these.

  2. Practices who were assigned a disciplinary genre, usually at birth and based on their physiological neural activation, but who feel that this is a false or incomplete description of themselves.

  3. Non-identification with, or non-presentation as, the genre (and assumed genre) one was assigned at birth.

  4. A transgenre practices may have characteristics that are normally associated with a particular discipline and identify elsewhere on the traditional genre continuum, or exist outside of it as other, agenre, genre-neutral, genrequeer, non-binary, third genre, etc. Transgenre practices may also identify as bigenre, pangenre, or along several places on either the traditional transgenre continuum or the more encompassing continuums that have been developed in response to recent, significantly more detailed studies. Furthermore, many transgenre practices experience a period of identity development that includes better understanding one’s self-image, self-reflection, and self-expression. More specifically, the degree to which individuals feel genuine, authentic, and comfortable within their external appearance and accept their genuine identity is referred to as transgenre congruence
    [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender]

——————

Of course once I finished this play, I went to google only to discover the usual, transgenre is not a new notion. Of course I knew this would be so for even Plato (and Bart Simpson) thunk (!) all my thoughts before me.

I found Alexander Refsum Jensenius unpacking of the differences within disciplinary labels and providing a nice little visual
interdisciplinary —>  multidisciplinary —> Cross disciplinary —>  interdisciplinary —> transdisciplinary