12/29/12
12/28/12
12/27/12
12/26/12
Mind's Eye World
What a great image for a NYT piece on schizophrenia by Matt Dorfman. Louis Sass describes the mental state of schizophrenics as the "mind's eye world." (Paradoxes of Delusion) What he means by this is that unlike the classic psychoanalytic understanding of schizophrenics as people with poor reality-testing and wish-fulfillment notions who are developmentally regressive and primitive, "like the child of age five or younger to whom everything seems real," actual schizophrenics exhibit such characteristics of self-consciousness or solipsism as distance or irony toward their own delusions and a system of "double-bookkeeping" (you may be trying to poison me, but I will still eat the dinner you serve). "It is, to be sure, a self-deceiving condition, but one that is generated from within rationality itself, rather than by a loss of rationality."
New Technological Advancements
Just received a spam message with the subject line "Ellen Degeneres Weight Loss." The internet is reaching a new level of creepiness.
12/24/12
One thing I'm fairly sure of...
This is the last winter break I will spend working on my dissertation.
12/23/12
Danh Vo at the Renaissance Society
"I was never interested in persent[ing] myself as just a unified thing that does one kind of work. I think as human being[s] we work differently and we have different side[s] of ourselves. I thought maybe that would be a good situation now to present these kinds of differences." --Danh Vo in conversation with Hamza Walker about his show Uterus at the Renaissance Society.The entrance to the Renaissance Society had become a corridor with back-lit niches containing letters from Henry Kissinger to the newspaper columnist Leonard Lyons. Time and again, Kissinger thanks Lyons for providing tickets to a ballet of show or for thinking of him, even when Kissinger had other things to do, like contemplating the situation in Cambodia. The letters date to the late-1960s and early 1970s, while Kissinger was carrying out a secret bombing campaign in that country.
The corridor opens out to the large, vaulted space of the Ren itself, hardly containing anything at all. To the left, in the corner, some boxes printed with gold and red ink, containing a somewhat off-puttingly fragrant bouquet of pink and white lilies; a wooden box enclosing plaster casts of someone's lower legs and feet; some glass shelves displaying a few sketches, a blonde hair piece, a letter from a gallerist describing a medieval wooden sculpture of Joseph.
At one end of the gallery, a strange assemblage atop a makeshift wooden pedestal: a piece of carved wood topped by plastic packing material topped by a piece of cast bronze. The sickly feeling that the wooden piece, sawn to reveal its cross-section, was the very medieval Joseph described in the gallerist's letter on the nearby shelf. In another corner, between some windows, a photograph of a pensive boy looking out a window demonstrating how he pops his shoulder blade out like a wing. Further down some rough bronze wedges melted down from a refused commission. At the other end, an scattering of iron traps, the kind with teeth that you see ensnaring cartoon animals in cartoon woods.
Anectodes. Points of reference. Sculpture. Vietnamese Danish conceptual artist. Artifacts. Relics. Things coming apart and reconstituting. "I was never interested in persent[ing] myself as just a unified thing..."
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