The Jackette

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• on December 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  Existential exercise: the art of Heesco 

  “The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are invisible. This is evident. The force is closely related to sensation: it is enough that a force be exerted on a body, that is, on a specific point of the wave, for there to be sensation.” – Gilles Deleuze

  Pull up. The artist hangs as he lifts his body up. He carries his own weight. The force of his suspended weight, the pressure, is rendered visible on his face. His cheeks expand, his jaw clenches and his eyes and brow scrunch up. His body descends. He lifts himself back up. Tightening. Then releasing. The artist moves but remains static. Dangling there he lifts his head high for a moment before dropping down again.  He stays there in that same place. Struggling.
   

  

  Why does an artist paint a self-portrait?  I propose it is a form of resistance training. An artist creates, renders something visible, and that creation then exerts force upon the viewer. There is a sensation. An impact. But when the artist’s creation is an image of the artist themselves, the force of the artists own symbolic body impacts their physical body. The imagined self feedbacks onto the physical self. The act of painting self-portraits becomes an existential push up, or in Heesco’s case, a pull up. Heesco pushes his image away from himself , projects it on to paper, and then pulls his image back to himself, through the sensation of seeing his own projected image. The repetitive nature of Heesco’s series of self-portraits also enforces the idea that his painting is a form of existential exercise:

  I am / I show that I am / I see that I am / I am : 9 Repetitions

  It is evident from Heesco’s previous work that he considers existence as a choice. An exercise that one chooses to undertake.

  Heesco left Mongolia in controversy. He had self published a book with a friend that had the Mongolian press claiming as a guide to suicide. Only 150 copies were printed and were distributed mainly among friends and university students, but copies of the book found their way to government officials, and Internal Affairs, the equivalent to ASIO, started an investigation into Heesco.

  The book was called ‘Caffeine Deficiency’ and was a collection of short stories, poetry and illustrations about a group of teenagers coming to terms with a post-communist Mongolia. It reflected a disaffected and depressed generation that Heesco belonged to.

  “It didn’t say go and kill yourself really. It just portrayed our state of mind at the time, which was pretty bleak,” Heesco said.

  Francesca Alfano Miglietti writes that existence itself can be a form of artistic expression. The title of the series ‘Six Feet Over’ as opposed to ‘Six Feet Under’ demonstrates that Heesco views these works as representative of his survival, of not being pulled under. The works show the artist struggling against the weight of his own body, the weight of his own existence, dragging him under, into the darkness. An exit sign glows in this darkness, offering an escape, but the artist continues to hang. His face scrunches up and he lifts himself up. He continues with this exercise of existence.

  
  Tags: art (3), catalogue essay, existentialism (2), Francesca Alfano Miglietti, heesco, painting, weight training   

   

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• on October 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  Brightkite and location based micro-reviewing 

  Last night my brother Leigh and I were wandering around Chinatown trying to find a place for a quick eat. Finally we settled on XIC Lo Vietnamese Restaurant because I liked the look of their aluminum benches. It would be like eating off an autopsy table. Appetising. We sat down and before looking at the menus we took out our iPhones and ‘checked in’. Using Brightkite we posted our location onto the web for all the world to see.

  Not too long ago I was teasing Simon Reynolds for taking out his iPhone and updating his facebook status when we met for a brief coffee.

  ‘Do you really think your friends care which cafe you’re having coffee at?’ I asked
  ‘Yeh, I’d love to know where all my friends were now and what they were doing,’ he replied.

  I originally laughed off Simon’s urge to be constantly connected but as I began to start playing with my own iPhone and its various networking apps I began to see the value in these tools and in particular Brightkite. By logging into a location, posting notes and photos at that location, Brighkite will begin to build up a database of micro reviews that people can consider before drinking, dancing, or dining at that location.

  It will completely alter the urban environment and each cafe, restaurant, bar, club, shop or university will have the equivalent of a public notice board plastered on the door. On this notice board there will be comments like ‘the DJ here needs to stop listening to the top 40’ or ‘the coffee was served too cold’ or ‘the corn fritters here are incredible’. It will be the equivalent of reviews at the bottom of amazon book listings, user generated rating thats will ultimately affect the success or failure of a location.

  I look forward to this near future where I won’t have too much trouble trying to decide which place to eat noodles at in Chinatown.

  
  Tags: arcades, brightkite, chinatown, leigh newman, micro-reviewing, mobile, networks, simon reynolds   

  Books and Magazines Blog » Archive » Brightkite and location based micro-reviewing is discussing. Toggle Comments

   

• on October 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  Creating connections 

  At the Hotel Waterloo in Wellington my grandmother hurries to room 507 to write a letter to her husband.  From her window she can see the port where he is preparing to board a ship bound for Egypt.

  As I am unable to see you to give you one more last goodbye hug I have rushed back here to write you my goodbyes.
  Dearest remember always no matter where you are and in what circumstances I am with you – closer than breathing – spirit with your spirit. I am so at one with you.

  She is separated from him. Himeros: she desires his embrace. Yet she cannot. Instead she writes to him: Pothos. He is absent and she shapes the space between them with language. In this space she connects to her beloved. Only here in the mediated or virtual realm, created through language, can she be closer than breathing.

  Villem Flusser writes that communication is an artificial construct. The words “I love you” that as a sixteen year old I first whispered into a girl’s ear are no more natural than the electric images glowing from a box in a lounge room.  Communication and the various systems of language constructed by man exist for the purpose of rendering the abstract tangible.  Allowing the unknown to exist in our daily discourses. Language can, through abstraction, create space for the imagining of meaning.

  John Hanhardt writes that Gary Hill’s work is ironic in that it concerns itself with the threat of the erasure of language by the very technologies he uses in his art.  There is however no chasm between language and communication technologies such as video. Language is not limited to the written or spoken word. Language is by definition a system of communication and the written and spoken word is so often supplanted with the term “language” because it is a system that can be easily measured.

  The English alphabet has a set of 26 symbols and these symbols are combined and collected into compilations called dictionaries that list how the symbols should be defined.  The written and spoken word therefore is very typical of a system if a system were to be defined as set of principles and guidelines similar to the rules of a game. If we were however to define a system as a set of things that are interconnected together into a network then new communication technologies such as the internet or television, which are focused primarily on creating connections, are as valid, if not more valid, than the written and spoken word as language. This definition of a system as an interconnecting network is more suitable as it is the very nature of communication to create connections.

  As a media artist I create connections, or rather I mediate. I present a medium, be it a video, a sound or a website, be it hot or cool, it is a medium, and this is what differentiates the media artist from the traditional concept of an artist. The medium shapes a void where connections can take place. A media artist presents a medium, not an object. The difference is of intention and not necessarily technology. A media artist presents a work with the intention to communicate rather than create.  The naïve boundaries drawn up by technologies are neglect to consider why particular tools have been adopted by media artists. Media artists predominantly utilise technologies that have been developed for communication purposes, technologies such as video were developed to aid transmission for broadcast television. The use of these technologies are primarily motivated by a desire to create a connection.

  In this regard a media artist is not dissimilar to a lover writing a letter to their beloved. Both the media artist and the lover utilise language, an interconnecting system, to present a medium that shapes the imaginary void where we can be closer than breathing.

  
  Tags: artist, communication, love letters (2), media art, medium, technology   

   

• on October 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  Comings and Goings: an explanation 

  ‘Future art criticism will be structured by the measuring of the various phases of ugliness as it grows habitual: it will measure exactly how one gets accustomed to ugliness, how the new grows old.’ – Vilem Flusser

  It happened by accident. I moved into a new studio and paranoid about security I set up a motion sensor webcam. Each day I arrived in the studio I would review the photographs that it had taken. There were no images of balaclava clad prowlers, only photographs of myself, entering and exiting the studio. I turned off the camera when I arrived and turned it on again when I left. The repetitive images of me opening and closing the door became bookends to that moment of time in the studio. A moment of time where I made art.

  I began a blog documenting my entrances and exits entitled ‘Comings and Goings’. The repetitive documentation inverted the actual art object in time and space. The photographs of my entrances were titled ‘Andrew Newman enters the studio for purpose of making art’ and my exits were titled ‘Andrew Newman exits his studio having made art.’ The inversion of the artwork through the framing of its production encouraged the imagination of the artwork itself. Drawing parallels with Heidegger’s definition of ‘the thing’
  these photographic bookends of moments of time illustrate that an artwork can exist not through the material in which it is formed but rather by the emptiness that is shaped through the documentation of its production. This imagination of the void is possible through repeats in photography as opposed to the repetitive image of video or film because by its nature photography misses moments of time. These missing moments extend the imaginary space, allowing the viewer to participate in the production of the image. As Godard said, ‘A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end.. but not necessarily in that order.’ The documentation in ‘Coming and Goings’ presents only the beginning and then the end, compelling the viewer to engage with the work and imagine the middle of the story.

  The habitual repetition of the action of entering and leaving the studio also present a persistent passing of time not dissimilar from Beckett’s play ‘Come and Go.” The measuring of moments of time provokes boredom as attention is drawn to the passing of time and the new becomes old. Repetitive photography that records a daily habit invokes a narrative with no end. ‘Coming and Goings’ thus presents an experience that calls for the imagination of a middle while because of its repetitive nature also incites an absurd experience of no end.

  
  Tags: boredom, comings and goings, flusser, habit, heidegger (6), repetition, space, time   

   

• on October 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  Words are hollow empty objects 

  Myra MacDonald writes in ‘Discourse and Representation’ that “words and images, by defining and labeling phenomena, frame the terms in which we think about these and may, in turn, influence policy making”. She says that the use of language can both create and perpetuate meaning in our cultural and social relationships. Gavin Kitching, a lecturer at UNSW in political studies, wrote in a recent essay in The Australian Literary Review (Kitching 2008)  that this sort of postmodern treatment of language has created a school of thinking that is itself impotent in discussing things of substance.

  This is Kitching’s reponse to students honours papers that he analysed for his book ‘The Trouble with Theory: The Educational Costs of Postmodernism’.

  The failure of all the student authors to appreciate the significance of the distinction between language and the use of language (and the determinism that produced) was also closely bound up with their conception of the meaning of words. Nearly always these students treated abstract nouns as if they were the names of curious sorts of hollow objects. And “doing theory” therefore consists of looking at “society” (another object) from somewhere imaginatively outside “it”, and seeing how the people who, as it were, have to live inside these hollow spaces are constrained in their thoughts and actions as a result. (Kitching 2008)

  I, a student who has been plagued by postmodern theory since it was first introduced to me in year 11 with the new Board of Studies English syllabus, have no ammunition but postmodern thought to retaliate against Kitching with, so I will begin by analysing his use of language.

  Kitching writes that there is a significant distinction between language and the use of language. I am sure he is trying to illustrate something similar to the significant distinction between roads and the use of roads. There is a road outside my home that goes to Sydney University, actually the road passes Sydney University, it would really depend on my use of the road whether I went to Sydney University or not. I would have to turn off the road. I have thus illustrated how roads and the use of roads are different.

  In the same regard I will use language to tell you how it is distinctively different from the use of language.

  There is a language outside my home that goes to Sydney University, actually the language passes Sydney University, it would really depend on my use of the language whether I went to Sydney University or not. I would have to turn off the language. I have thus illustrated how language and the use of language are different.

  I am unsure if I have made a point. I am unsure what point I wish to make. I will let Kitching make another point while I turn off my language:

  The problems that result from not distinguishing the definition of words from their uses, and from always treating abstractions as the names of imprisoning objects, are further compounded when the two misunderstandings are put together, as in fashionable postmodernist treatment of identity or subjectivity. Here, language as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that “language” determines the meaning of “identity” words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal – and thus “constructs” (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.” (Kitching 2008)

  As a student corrupted by postmodernism I completely agree with this “words as hollow objects” business that Kitching takes a distaste to. I mean what is “Gavin Kitching”? I know he is a lecturer, but what is a lecturer? We have to find these definitions for the words, and forget about their uses. But whenever I look for the definitions I only find more words, and then I need to look for those definitions. And who wrote those definitions anyway, probably one of Kitching’s pals over at Macquarie and their gumtree green dictionary. I will instead define it by the use of the words. In fact I will create a use for the word, I am never really going to use “Gavin Kitching” again so I will redefine it. I am looking for a word to describe the combined water and toothpaste residue that builds up around my electric toothbrush.

  I just got up and walked into my bathroom and pointed at the electric toothbrush.

  “Look at all that Gavin Kitching, I’m going to have to clean up that Gavin Kitching otherwise my flat mates going to start complaining to me about how disgusting that Gavin Kitching is.”

  I have just made a performative utterance that according to J.L. Austin,  the founding father of performance studies (a very postmodernist school of thought), uses language to change status. (Austin 1975)

  An example of this is the utterance “I do” that changes the status of someone to spouse.

  So my act of ‘naming’ the toothpaste and water residue staining my basin in my bathroom has reduced Kitching to scum.

  Or is that slander?

  Language isn’t static and the study of language as dynamic and treating words as hollow objects is necessary to understand power play in society, and how words can become loaded.

  Language defines our society we need to treat it skeptically so excuse me for questioning definitions.

  Marshall McLuhan says that writing is a medium that reproduces speech and that speech is a medium that reproduces thought so in a sense writing is consciousness and i would appreciate someone that would argue with me that consciousness is stable and consistently definable. (McLuhan 1964)

  NB. Gavin Kitching is not toothpaste residue. I enjoyed his article and intend to read his book. I am oblivious if Gavin Kitching has any friends that work on Macquarie Dictionary.  I was being postmodern.

  Austin, J.L. 1975, How to do things with words, 2d edn, Clarendon Press, Oxford [Eng.].

  Kitching, G. 2008, ‘Paralysed by postmodernism’, The Australian Literary Review, 6 August, pp. 12-13.

  McDonald, M 2003, Exploring Media Discourse, Arnold, c.1 ‘Discourse and representation’.

  McLuhan, M. 1964, Understanding media : the extensions of man, Routledge; Kegan Paul, London.

  
  Tags: gavin kitching (2), language (3), mcluhan, myra mcdonald, postmodernism (2), void   

   

• on October 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  A call to arms and the absent other 

  It begins with a call to arms. I dress in my grandfather’s military uniform and address the camera I am being transmitted. I call for a revolution, but language fails me. I speak gibberish. I am calling for the other. I am calling to be touched.

  In 1940, my grandfather, Sidney James Conlon was called to arms. An engineer for the New Zealand army, he had enlisted himself before the war began because serving the state was one of the few sources of employment. But in 1940 he was called to fight for his ‘mother country’, Great Britain, in the very distant and foreign continent of Africa.

  He had never left the shores of New Zealand.

  All he understood of this war and the world it consumed was seen through the flickers of the cinema screen. The world news briefing where everyone in the audience stood up and sung “God Save the Queen” before the screening started.

  The world was transmitted to my grandfather by the machinery of the cinema. He was called to arms via the screen.

  The cinema screen. A large white space. The focus of the funnel of the theatre. An empty space. It is in essence Heidegger’s void. It ceases to exist as some thing  until shadows and light begin to dance on the screen, projected from behind people’s backs. For a moment the void is filled, but only for a moment. The frame, the captured image, hovers in space for a split second before it fades. For my grandfather the war and world appeared briefly in front of him before slipping from his grasp and retracting into the ether. He followed it. He left his lover and followed the call to arms.

  Sixty years later his grandson sits in front of a television awkwardly grasping for the hand of a girl who wants to hear the words ‘I love you’.  Her face basks in the glow of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet.

  The flicker of the cinema screen or the glimmer of the television. Both fulfill Heidegger’s prophecy of abolishing ‘every possibility of remoteness’ without making anything near. This is the intimacy of the remote. This is the love I uncovered in the love letters. A love borne of absence, or of emptiness, a space without the other.

  Now,  absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is by vocation, migrant, fugitive; I – I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless. At hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense.

  Roland Barthes writes that there are two desires, or two words for two desires,  drawn from two greek gods, the sons of Aphrodite. Pothos, a desire for the absent
  being, and  Himeros, the more burning desire for the present being. I would argue that the two desires cannot be distinguished  simply by proximity. The two desires are to be distinguished by the methods assumed in connecting to the other. I tell the other I love her. I use language to connect. I touch her. I use my body to connect. Pothos; I speak to you. Himeros; I touch you. I reach for her hand. She waits for a word.

  Both Pothos and Himeros are forms of sexual love, this is  the love I am discussing, not familial love or religious love (Singer). This love itself can exist only as Pothos. ‘I love you’. It is language.  Whispered into the others ear, written in a letter, or typed in a text message. It is a call to arms, a call to be touched. The other is always absent when I speak to her. I use language to call her nearer. That is the nature of love.

  Hume writes that all sexual love contains a yearning for continued oneness with the beloved. Plato says that love is a striving for perpetual possession. Neither are feasible. I will strive for you, I will desire you. But you are always the other. We do not join to become one. We connect as two, yet the yearning for oneness persists. We create the abstract to shape the void with language.

  “I love you.”

  I. It is I. And you, the other. In-between, is that void, shaped by language, the word love. Here, outside of ourselves and outside the other do we fulfill that myth of oneness. Here is the intimacy of the remote. I am absent from you. You are absent from I. Yet we are intimate. We both project ourselves onto that word love, like light and shadows projected onto the cinema screen. Here does love become some thing.

  
  Tags: barthes, cinema, heidegger (6), language (3), love (5), love letter (2), singer, television   

  Like a Virgin by Emily Maguire | The Jackette is discussing. Toggle Comments

   

• on October 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  Art, journalism and economics in the age of reproduction 

  ‘I suggest the idea that information processing is most productive when it is embedded in material production or in the handling of goods, instead of being disjointed in a stepped up technical division of labor.’ (Castells 1996)

  Castells writes that the Japanese economoy, which during the 1970s and 1980s was one of the most competitive economies among major economies, was successful because it had the lowest information to goods employment ratio.

  He argues that the information services provides a ‘stepped up technical division of labor’ a situation that draws parallels to the surreal bureaucratic dystopia displayed in Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. The film depicts an information economy where people are employed for what seems to be the sole purpose of moving, or pushing information. Castells informationalist economy has created a workforce similar to the workforce in Brazil of ‘knowledge workers’ (Drucker 1959) whose sole purpose is to manage information.

  Castells has a valid in point in suggesting that an economy is more productive when information processing is embedded in material production. Without the tangibility of material production the economy will crumble by trading in “hollow empty objects” (Kitching 2008), reaching an absurd situation similar to a Beckett play where the trading of information becomes a dialogue about nothing. It is a postmodern literary dilemma that has now surfaced in the global financial markets, people have been trading information, talking about nothing, and now that nothing has been undressed and brought into the stage spotlights in its all its empty and naked glory.

  This provides an insightful lesson to a journalist who’s duty is to produce information. A journalist produces content and should derive that content directly from the source. The ‘citizen and participatory journalism’ featured in the blogosphere and paraded as the future of journalism fundamentally feeds not on the primary source but the secondary sources of established news organizations as revealed in ‘Journalism’s Backseat Drivers’ (Palser 2005), bloggers act as “conduits between the mainstream media and the online zeitgeist”.

  These journalists are not hunting down the raw information but relying on the secondary source information, this is also evident in the established news organizations who due to time-restrictions are beginning to source their information from public relations offices and press agents. If journalists continue to reproduce, rework and recycle secondary information, the economy of information, as opposed to the information economy, will collapse. It is like duplicating a duplicate of a duplicate. A bootleg of a bootleg, an upteenth generation recording on a cassette tape deteriorates and soon it is nothing but noise. Truth will collapse and there is no government agency that has the desire or the ability to bail out truth.

  In art the problems of reproduction have been addressed since Andy Warhol, who began his practice at the beginning of the ‘post-industrialist society’ that is discussed by Castells. The 1936 essay by Walter Benjamin ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin says that a work of art will loses Aura as it becomes reproduced by machines in magazines and postcards. The Aura was the cultural value given to an artwork and did not exist in the object itself but was formed through external attributes, such as its ownership, restricted access through exhibitions and its publicized authenticity. Artists in the post-industrialist era began to search for new ways of instilling value in works and they did this through creation of concepts, artists became purveyors of ideas, and the ideas themselves became the commodity that artists would trade.

  Concepts and truth are regarded almost as two opposing forces on the information spectrum, concepts are subjective and truth is objective, and journalists need to safeguard the ‘aura’ of truth in order for journalism to survive an informationalist era that seems to be feeding on the thriving abstracts in the hyperreality where we simulate something that never really existed (Baudrillard 1988) .

  You can see a situation where I am generating art without tangibly producing art on a blog I have recently begun called Comings and Goings. It is a situation where I document myself entering my studio with the purpose to make art, the art produced is never shown. The artwork in this case is my action or my idea of ‘intending to make art’.

  
  Tags: blogging (3), castells, citizen journalist, gilliam, production, reproduction, warhol   

  Andrew Newman exits his studio on Wednesday, October 1, after having made art | Comings and Goings is discussing. Toggle Comments

   

• on September 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  The Floating Opera and the art of treading water 

  The morning of June 21st (or 22nd), 1937, Todd Andrews wakes with a solution. He is going to kill himself. He continues the idle routine of his day with the quiet resolve that this day will be his last.

  Todd Andrews is my name. You can spell it with one or two d’s; I get letters addressed either way. I almost warned you against the single-d spelling, for fear you’d say, ‘Tod is German for death: perhaps the name is symbolic.’ I myself use two d’s, partly in order to avoid that symbolism. But you see, I ended by not warning you at all, and that’s because it just occured to me that the double-d Todd is symbolic, too, and accurately so. Tod is death, and this book hasn’t much to do with death; Todd is almost Tod – that is, almost death – and this book, if it gets written, has very much to do with almost-death.

  John Barth’s The Floating Opera is a novel about ‘almost-death’ or more succinctly ‘life’. Todd Andrews is a young solicitor who suffers a condition of the heart where every beat could be his last. He adapts various systems of living to cope with this condition. The first being life as a rake in college where ‘the goal was to drink the most whisky, fornicate the most girls, get the least sleep, and make the highest grades’.

  Todd Andrew’s fast living soon fizzled out on a brothel floor with a swollen prostate and a broken glass bottle embedded in his leg. He countered that system of living with life as a saint. This involved sitting on window sills, sunk in shadows, speaking very little. Life as a saint succeeded for Todd Andrews until his best friend loaned him his wife after a nice day of sailing. The next system of living was life as a cynic. Cynicism survived until the morning of June 21st (or 22nd) when Todd Andrews despaired.

  The conclusion that swallowed me was this: There is no way to master the fact with which I live. Futility gripped me by the throat; my head was tight. The impulse to raise my arms and eyes to heaven was almost overpowering – but there was no one for me to raise them to. All I could do was clench my jaw, squint my arms, and shake my head from side to side. But every motion pierced me with its own futility, every new feeling with its private hopelessness, until a battery of little agonies attacked from all sides, each drawing its strength from the great agony within me.

  The novel is soaked in Sixties nihilism yet Todd Andrews’ calculated and measured manner of living resembles the very systematic and applied ‘life guides’ featured in the Noughties phenomena of life hacking.

  John Barth was only 24 when he wrote The Floating Opera. The novel involves that existential search for the solution to living that is prevalent in the early novels of writers of the period. This search for the solution to living is evident in the ‘life hack’ blogs of young writers Clay Collins and Scott H Young. Both bloggers are attempting to master the methods of living.

  This is how existential angst has surfaced and thrived in the electronica era. It has dissolved into some sort of quest to modify habits so that people can become more productive. If you’re not flapping your arms about filling up space then you’re failing to live. This would have been the fourth phase of Todd Andrews had he been able to log on to Wordpress and register a blog.

  Merlin Mann, who was right there at the beginning blogging about productivity hacks, has recently redefined the purpose of his site 43 folders. It is now a site about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work. It is a step out of the bleak black hole of life hacking in that it suggests that you should focus your attention more on what you are producing rather than the the act of producing itself. Swimming somewhere rather than attempting to perfect the art of treading water.

  This is the failure of the life-hacking community. A young intelligentsia skipping over existential crises so focused on finding the easiest way to do something that they forget to question what really should be done.

  Todd Andrews worked on his Inquiry. A never-ending project, much like a blog, that attempted to uncover ‘why things are’. There should be more blogs answering this Inquiry of Todd Andrews.

  
  Tags: blogging (3), book review (3), existentialism (2), john barth, lifehacks, merlin mann, the floating opera   

  Andrew Newman exits his studio on Monday, September 29, after having made art | Comings and Goings is discussing. Toggle Comments