Month: April 2003

How evil are you?
Finally, a “test” that I can agree with… 🙂

Some days, too many, I don’t feel that I get enough significant stuff done. I have been here all day working on writing. I’ve got 2 interviews to go thru and glean something from. However, before I can make sense of what I want to say, I need to write a preliminary article that frames the interviews and subsequent articles in a series that I’m working on.

I’ve asked three, and will ask other, museum directors to look to the future and tell me what the future looks like for Southeast Florida art and culture. That’s from W. Palm Beach to Miami. There are a number of museums but I’m also interested in the universities. There are two prongs to my thinking. One is that they are holders of collections (only some of the universities have collections as such) and all that that means to be a repository. The second is along the lines of the educational mandates that go along with having non-profit status, although corporations are snuggling up to the museums for the high profile cultural value it lends them (with some high dollar “donations” for programming). And even though museums are not-for-profit, they usually do have gift shops, books stores, and such which brings in commodification of that culture.

So, as can be seen, I’ve bitten into a big project but, it will have something self-serving in the end. It will first of all, allow me to get to know the museum directors better and, it will give me something more important to write about than what exhibition I might have seen over the weekend. Normally, I only write on what really interests me and that is something I can bring some personal experience to. Whatever those things are usually have a socio-cultural framework from which I can contextualize in a way that is not the hegemonic view, and postcolonial is highly preferred to postmodernism.

The beginning of postmodernism I was on hiatus, out racing bicycles and traveling. I was, however, still reading critical theory, anthropology, ethnology, non-western religious systems (African in particular), ethnobotany, and plenty of books on nutrition, athlete training, massage, and race tactics based on physiology and musculature.

Anyway, it’s way past my bedtime again. I’m more in tune with the night than getting up early in the morning… I work in the afternoon tomorrow. 🙂

Just a few days ago I was struck by the misuse of the word, “surreal.” Today at the Univ. there were three guests, 2 visual artists/teachers and an art historian/teacher, talking to the students about “postmodernism.” This lecture, and panel discussion, gave a brief overview as to what postmodernism is and its various points of view as a theory. One of the theorists mentioned was Jean Baudrillard. He is credited with coining the term “hyperrealism” by talking about “the meticulous reduplication of the real” and how what we know as reality is a replication of reality as an image of itself. I have read some of Baudrillard’s work but, I haven’t read enough of it to fully understand it to my satisfation. One thing that bothers me about some of this type of writing is its “privileged voice.” Privileged in the sense of those in the “west” speaking as if theories can be applied across all cultures and societies in the same way. The so-called third world shouldn’t want to “BE” like us, although they may want some of what we have: good food, water, clothing, ease of transportation, ease of access, health, etc.

One of today’s lecturer/artists mentioned currently reading Homi Baba, a postcolonial writer and, born into the Parsi community of Bombay, teaching in a U.S. university (I’m not sure where he’s currently teaching). I was surprised to hear a white woman was reading on postcolonialism. Surprised mostly because she is white because many whites (excuse the generalisation) would rather not talk about the effects of colonialism either here in the Americas, Europe, nor in Africa itself. Naturally, I asked two questions that brought out some of these issues. They thanked me for the questions.
[edited 11 Apr., 2003]

Surreal or surrealism is a word totally misused today. I was reading an essay on the work of photographer Jeff Wall, and saw the word surreal in the first paragraph. His work is not surrealist but the word got me thinking about how much ‘surreal’ is used today. I wrote an essay back in 1991 for a photography course I was taking by independent study (I’ve done a lot of independent study). The professor recently gave me the paper back so, I glanced at it today and decided to excerpt the part on surrealism for current consumption. My work was called surrealist at one point, incorrectly.

I was checking links and realized author Wole Soyinka’s link to africana.com needed to be removed. He has returned to Nigeria. However, I needed to re-post a listing of his available works. Afterall, he was Nobel Laureate for Literature, 1986! April, 2003 update.