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This is a short and admittedly slightly random post based on a collection of observations about table tennis/ ping pong: I saw an exhibition in IMMA yesterday by Mark Clare and it seems that table tennis is the mode du jour to address geopolitical issues. Very zeitgesity.
There is a pleasing symnetry to it when you start to see it in an epic,East versus West, Communism versus Capitalism kind of way. After the jump, a short anthology of culturally important moments in table tennis. Contributions welcome…
1. An impoverished ping pong table collapses in the midst of a game among youngsters at Santa Anita assembly center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry, California, 1942. Image held here
I missed the boat on this one but it’s still a great idea and worthy cause. Not to mention an interesting experiment in ‘collective intelligence’…
There’s a lack of art/artist info on Wikipedia, and we’re often too busy to find the time to contribute. So, we’re setting aside one day where a crew of people collectively drop serious knowledge into wikipedia about art. From your favorite notable artwork, artist or exhibition, to our soon-to-be-famous peers. We’ll also add structural links to alumni schools and categories like collective art groups, non profit orgs, etc.<br>
The day is Saturday January 26th: an afternoon on the internet quietly enriching the public domain. We imagine groups of 2-4 people around tables across the country, bottomless coffee cups fueling the discussions, fact checking, and troubleshooting. Ideally lots of “oh, that person worked with X, I’ll make a page for them, link me up.” There will also be a lot of online chatting across coasts. Video chats if bandwidth permits.
Get the full info here
Image held here
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
… putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity and beauty mean nothing…
In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. This is why Nietzche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht)…
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Capital Paintings are a re-iteration, re-enactment or re-telling of a previous body of work by the artist, Capital, where he transcribed by hand the entire three volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Capital onto 480 two dimensional objects. Read the rest of this entry »
[the book above is The Future of Nostalgia, by Svetlana Boym]
A recent stay in Berlin found me at Ostel, a hostel renovated as an homage to ‘ostalgie’, in the style of the former DDR. (see this post)
My expectations of the place were of course building it up for a fall, but even still, it seemed oddly, eerily empty. It lacked spirit. And as much as it pains me to say it, it lacked the elusive texture of authenticity, not even that I would know what that was.
The rooms were furnished sparsely, mainly with what seemed like strips of imitation vintage wallpaper and IKEA furniture, peppered with some older items – in our room some beautiful books, a radio/ record player, and a fantastically ugly circular wicker-framed mirror. Builders were at work on scaffolding outside the window, which highlighted the grating, sparkly newness of the place, spotless tiled bathroom and all.
Almost instantly, the experience of walking through the corridors recalled my experience of Hotel Ballymun, something I have not written about here. The parallels between the 2 places are fascinating – one a self-conscious recreation that walked a line between irony and sincerity, manufacturing the authenticity (or the knowing postmodern suspicion of any such experience) craved by tourists; the other an art project that served as some kind of memorial that implicitly traded on such modes of collective experience and cultural memory.
‘I quit Facebook.’
This was announced to me during a lull in conversation during my lunch break yesterday. G (not the same G mentioned previously) said it with a certain determination, a certain set of the jaw, and carried through with a hint of pride. Something like the way would announce giving up cigarettes, except with more certitude and confidence, like this was a particularly nasty and worthless habit and he was particularly certain he would feel no need to return to it.
I just came across this work by Joseph Beuys while researching a Fluxus lecture… if I ever get around to it I resolve to compile a sizable selection of ’defaced money’ artworks. This piece is from 1979.
The irony of this particular work is the large, iconic artist’s signature that takes pride of place on the face of the note. This authorial statement, the form of a defacement, enacts a particular economic alchemy (such a suitable word in relation to Beuys’ oeuvre): it elevates it even closer to gold and exponentially further away from any intrinsic ‘use value’.
Perhaps, to give him credit, this was Beuys’ intention. Often though, his critical gestures were weighted heavily in favour of his own self-mythologisation.
[I think this might actually be the thumb of Engels, not Marx.]
Berlin, December 2007
My earliest connection with Berlin are two souvenir shot glasses that were a gift from my cousin Sean. Sean was my eldest cousin who lived in America, who decided to go travelling in Europe one summer, Europe, then as now, having a different meaning and weight to someone brought up in the States than to me. Especially me as someone who probably was barely ten at the time.
I remember him as charming and full of plamás, and a bit of chancer, so it was little surprise in retrospect that he brought back a piece of the Berlin wall. I’m not sure if it had even been taken down at the time, and I remember having difficulty understanding the significance of this smallish, innocuous looking piece of grey concrete. I don’t remember that much about it except that it was smallish (maybe the size of a ten year old palm) and was lighter than I expected something so important to be.
I was born in 1981 and for me the falling of the Berlin Wall is a memory but it feels like fiction. It belongs to a time of the Live Aid concert, mullet haircuts, a certain cut of leather jacket, and not being allowed to watch Home and Away (‘too much sex in it’). I can feel all these memories even though I was not even four when the Live Aid concert happened. They are impossible memories, recorded on the grainy analogue of VHS, and played on a video player our household did not possess until the mid nineties.
Sean died in the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001. I felt his loss and remembered him in Berlin.
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