Last Days at Spannochia

Last days here at this organic farm where we have turned over the earth of old thinking for new ideas about the Post Modern.
At the moment we are what is left of two years of philosophizing. The second year students gone to Milan and we are left to torment our teachers (Chris and Seth) with our prodigious lack of knowledge. Stumbling blindly over artist's names and slogging through the fog of Kantian aesthtics, we are in our last few hours of dreaded presentations. Feeling very much like we are on the receiving end of the boiling oil that would be poured onto the barbaraions of the 12th century, we persist in assaulting the castello with our desire to unlock the secrets of the White Book.

We leave tomorrow to apply our new tools of Post Modern thinking to the array of installations at the 2009 Venice Biennale. For the next five days we will be emmersed in the Venetian culture of gelatos, and vaporettos. I can't wait but I don't want to leave. How to close the space between desire for two disparate experiences?

Walk the Stones

There are only three days left before I leave for Rome and then on to Spannocchia for the first leg of the PhD in visual art through the Institute for Doctoral Studies in Visual Art. Only three days left before..........Italy.......where I can walk on old stones, feel the reverb of history through my shoe leather. I give up the impermanent footprints of the Cherokee and Creek for the clattering stones of an ancient empire. I give up my old ways of thinking for a new perspective on the trajectory of art in the 20th century. Will I ever understand the post-Post Modernity of Altermodernity? Am I a member of that tribe? any tribe? as the old is subverted by the unknown.

Trekking through Philosophy

References to Kant in my 20c reading sent me to B an N for back story reading. So now I am highlighting Kant, A Short Introduction. Not easy reading by any means but persistence seems to bring light to the subject. Grappling with the Critique of Pure Reason was probably not the place to start.