Somes thoughts on the situation & a manifesto

Part 1. Modern, postmod, the body-

On provincialism, to support the new and odd thesis that in a “global” artworld whose locus is the multinational corporation of the elite art market/museum complex, all artists are from the provinces, and all practices are imitative of the practices that have developed around the marketing impulse . So this point re the practice of provincials in relation to the center is relevant to nearly all artists who are outside the magic circle—and those inside the magic circle have gained their access through similarly displaced and decentered practices, hence on the basis of mere appearance, or in other words a purely horizontal association with other similar practices, rather than a level-jumping or transformative vertical mimetic process that finds its origins in the non-art world.

Dennis Keene’s description of the early Japanese avant-garde in his Yokomitsu Ri’ichi: Modernist, the first book-length work to address Japanese modernist literature in English:

"It is with this kind of literature [the work of Hirato Renkichi and Hagiwara Kyôjirô] that charges of imitation start to sound reasonable. The attempts to write “space cubist poems” look as preposterous as the attempts of Japanese poets in recent years to write “concrete” poems with typewriters when set against a thousand-year-old tradition of calligraphy which had established the poem as a visual object in a way totally impossible in the West. For these writers their image of writing and the writer is Westernized in the sense that they have a picture of what these things mean in the West, and it is to that picture they wish to conform. “Imitation” is thus not really the appropriate word here, since there is not sufficient acquaintance with the originals. An abstracted image sways them as they write, and since it must be an up-to-date image, it never has time to establish itself in any depth. The motive force comes from images, ideas, abstractions, rather than from actual words. Since this motive force is thus inevitably superficial, it either produces works of no value or, for a writer who does manage to write comparatively well, it has no real importance for his work as such."

On Eysteinsson’s ideas of modernism:

In his book The Concept of Modernism, Astradur Eysteinsson tries to establish where a critical consensus can be found regarding this concept, and notes the many contradictions regarding the idea of modernism in Western literature. “There is a rapidly spreading agreement that ‘modernism’ is a legitimate concept broadly signifying a paradigmatic shift, a major revolt beginning in the mid- and late nineteenth century, against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world,” he writes. “But this is as far as we can assume a critical and theoretical consensus to go. Beyond this point we face strikingly variable and often seemingly irreconcilable theories concerning the nature of the revolt.” Typically, even the broadest, most consensual definition Eysteinsson is able to provide begs the question of the meaning, or even the possibility, of modernism arising in a place such as Japan, by bounding its meaning to the traditions and anti-traditions of the “Western world.”

Another question that ties into this is this: the postmodern turn in art, related to the linguistic turn in philosophy, postulates that what culture must talk about is culture, that there is no reachable first-order level of experience that is unmediated by human consciousness. This is a condition that has certainly become part of our culture, both high and low, but that the culture (particularly the "low" parts, let's say) has been struggling with for the past decade or so, with phenomena like the "fight clubs" in suburban eastern cities, reality television, the spread of "extreme" sports, and even the growing prevalence of meth as a drug of choice. All of these things indicate a cultural hunger for the vividness of mind-body union, where the mind takes its orders from the body and its sensations, where the body is submitted to the vagaries of the nonhuman world through physical experience and risk. The artworld seems slow to respond to this--are there any evidences of it in the practice of artists that you know?
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. Dennis Keene, Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) 68-69.
. Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) 2.

Part 2. Energy= light=information
A postulate that uses morphology to bear itself out

Matter tends toward a condition of entropy, matter is always becoming more disorganized, heading toward an eventual condition of heat death, equidistant distribution of all molecules, the real “end of history”. The end of time because the end of event.

What are the countercurrents? Only when energy is put into a system can the entropic direction be reversed. Or when information is put into a system. They work very similarly, it seems, in this antientropic function. Life is a state in which the antientropic effects of energy are multiplied by the living entities’ ability, though information transmission of various kinds, to create self-elaborating structures that multiply manyfold the antientropic effects of energy inputs.

Let’s apply this to notions of living systems.

The earth bears upon it a vast network of living beings, all of which ultimately get all of their energy, all of their antientropic force, from light—but mostly this can’t happen directly. The single conduit on this planet through which light passes in order to become structure (matter, form, information, reuseable energy) is the photosynthetic plant world. The morphology of plants has evolved in ways that enable plants to, in a multitude of settings and conditions, turn light most efficiently into matter (and energy for the growth of matter and for mobility, thought, etc., in the case of those living beings who eat plant matter. Such plant matter is not simply biomass but also contains vast amounts of information, in the form of enzymes, etc, which trigger certain processes in the consuming being).

So light translates itself into complex living matter, a type of embodied information, through the bodies of plants and eventually animals of all kinds. These embodied information systems, light-derived, take forms, many of which seem to be mimetic to the forms plants adopt in order to receive light most efficiently and effectively. As one gets closer to the morphology of pure information transmission, let us say in neurology, one sees that information is also energy—shaped electrical impulse—and that the structures living beings have evolved to transmit thought, information, are dendritic—tree-shaped.

This is less a scientific insight than an aesthetic one, not an insight that creates researchable questions and answers but one that studies the morphology of both light reception and information transmittal and reception, and is willing to simply dwell in the descriptions of the forms and let insight grow around a growing familiarity with the deep systematicity, the deep connections, among light, plant bodies, life, information, and the transformations of mortality.

Such that when gazing at a fire of logs, one cannot help but know, viscerally, that the light and heat released from the wood when the catalyzing force of fire (an oxidation reaction like a metabolism gone wild that consumes and disperses the accumulated carbon-based matter), is the sunlight of fifty years ago, and 30 years ago, and 10 years ago, and that the tree has faithfully pulled the light into its body and elaborated the structure of cells, pulling carbon and minerals from the earth to combine with light, the sole nurturer of life here, creating the morphology that is an homage, a million faces turned, to the very light that it’s meant to capture.

It seems that visceral knowledge of the omnipresent necessity of this relation of matter and energy through the bodies of plants could change human relation to life on earth. If “life” didn’t usually mean only “human life” but instead referred to the thin dusting over the surface of the planet of the sole entientropic force that we can use, the photosynthetic transformation of solar energy into both matter and information, how differently could we could think about our actions in relation to this lifeworld?

Here science can describe but cannot convince, and won’t even take the time to describe because this state of affairs is on the way to nowhere, is simply a thing in itself. We need art that deeply knows the gathering ramifications of these insights and is willing to create resonant form informed by it.