Don’t look at the pointing finger… visuals, language, frames are forms of entrapment… (later, some excerpts from the 90 minute presentation may be posted). You can also write me to have access to the 1 hour 30 minute presentation.

On March 9, 2022, Pier Marton gave the following Zoom presentation (from the flyer below): WHAT NOW?! What could be missing from our conversations. –  Can we engage in a realm Marton calls “knowLEDGE” – Art and non-art, academia vs “real life,” etc. –  what fits or does not fit in our lives, And what we may do about that. Pier Marton is a video-artist who in spite of, or because of,lecturing about his work at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), wonders what lies beyond regular exchanges and art. This lecture is meant as a two-way communication process: from you, as part of the Boise State community, I learn what may be missing from the conversations you have had. Questions are key…. as Confucius is quoted as
saying, “I cannot help the one who has no question“

Nota Bene
When the presentation took place, the war and invasion of Ukraine had been going on for almost two weeks – the title, “WHAT NOW?!” had been decided a few months earlier when the arrangements for the lecture were made.
Even if was not going to focus directly on the war, I could not  appear anymore as a detached artist (that would have been hard even in “normal times”): I had to conjure up the ancient and venerable tradition of the artist as witness –
all while not wanting to upset my gracious hosts.

Thank you to the Art History Club at Boise State University for having invited me to engage with them… even with the perplexing title of “What Now?!“

I want to add some information here that could complement and anchor what I said (I may at some point post an excerpt from the Zoom session).

First some quotes I presented, available all together:

• The problem is not that you have not been educated. The problem is that you have been educated only enough to believe what you have been taught, and not enough to challenge everything you have been told. — Edgar Morin
• It is what I do that teaches me what I search for. — Pierre Soulages
• To have a free head: to be present.  — Georges Braque
• As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth. — Walter Benjamin
  
• Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation. — James Turrell
• With no object no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. — James Turrell
• If you are an artist and you are honest, you are never good enough.  —Jenny Holzer
• When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they’re decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that. — Hans Haacke
• There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism. — Walter Benjamin
  

  Arthur Brusselle, the artist/photographer as witness -1918-1919

  I also showed works by Goya (The Third of May 1808 & The Disasters of War), Victor Hugo’s drawings, and photographs by Georges DeKeerle and from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and others – pieces that may make it into an upcoming piece of mine.

• ‘That things just go on’ is the catastrophe.  — Walter Benjamin

I also alluded to the internet-based “Drowned Syrian boy Turkey” and the “Drowned Father Daughter El Salvador US Border” but did not present them – I consider them to be “obscene” (a topic of its own). I did show a picture of “A Huge Crowd A Few Days Ago, in Kyiv, Ukraine’s Capital Train Station?” – the picture had appeared on the internet…

• I hold up what I know with what I do not know. — Antonio Porchia

I also presented various extensive Mind Maps (indirectly related to Mark Lombardi’s work).

• Tell them that there is nothing to understand.
  I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying.
  Anything you experience based on knowledge is an illusion.? — U.G.
• Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black. ? — James Baldwin
• To know—that is the best way to put a stop to the movement of meaning. — Jacques Derrida

Some of the contributors (books are friends): Lao Tzu and his Tao Te King, Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred Jarry for their wise teenage rebellion, George Lakoff for his framing,  Roland Barthes for his Mythologies, Arne Naess for his deep-ecology, Bertolt Brecht for his distancing, Roman Jakobson for his “phatic function,” Edgar Morin for the complexity of anything(!), Guy Debord about The Spectacle (a link to the film), Walter Benjamin for his precision, & much later John Berger for his Ways of Seeing BBC series (not the book), Allan Kaprow for his bringing life into art, Charlotte Joko Beck for her puzzles, Antonin Artaud for his screams, U.G. for his radicality (going to the roots)…
Original plan included these artists: Francisco Goya, Francis Picabia, James Turrell, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger,  Mark Lombardi.

Jenny Holzer – Compilation (off the internet)

ScreensReveal&Conceal – © Marton 2011

I did get to present Unity Through Strength produced in 1981 – my response to viewing the live transmission of the killing of Archbishop Romero (canonized by Pope Francis on 14 October 2018) on Latino television in Los Angeles – repackaged with some free sampler of “audio-sweetening” tools.
I had also planned to show the short 1984, heaven is what I’ve done but there was not enough time. I also did not get to present Picabia and Mark Lombardi’s work. I would have loved to address the topic of idolatry and addiction… Maybe at another time.
Even if my lecture was supposed to address “art” and my chosen topic, the realm of knowLEDGE, the current war in Ukraine could not be ignored, and so the responsibility of artists had to be alluded to.

One of the starting points about some (relevant) words, from A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary Of The English Language by Ernest Klein.

ADDENDUM

IT is good practice to attribute the authors of quotes – I had mentioned “the kite can only fly because it is grounded – so that dear friend who is no longer with us, is R. Zalman Schachter.

COULD HAVE added these words to ScreensReveal&Conceal – from my teacher/friend, Jean Baudrillard: It is in its resemblance, not only analogical but technological, that the image is most immoral and most perverse.

HAD I known this would be published the following day, I would have mentioned my friend the artist, Suzanne Lacy’s interview in the NYT on March 10.
With a quote that is most relevant to the discussion that was started by Jadon M. (thank you!):
Catherine Wood, senior curator of international art at Tate Modern, London, says that as a result of the social and political shifts of the past few years, “we are coming to a new understanding of all art as social.” She believes the term “social practice” will become less relevant, the way “video art” or “performance art” have been absorbed by the mainstream

It is quite a bit more complex than what Caroline Wood states (absorption of dissent?!),
but that’s another discussion.

ALSO something I was not aware of during my presentation as I showed this drawing by Victor Hugo…

Victor Hugo, Ecce Lex (Le pendu) (Ecce Lex [hanged man]), 1854
Brown ink, brown and black wash, graphite, charcoal, and white gouache on paper. 20 × 13 3/4 in. (50.8 × 34.9 cm). Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris / Guernesey. MVHP.D.967 © Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris / Guernesey / Roger-Viollet

In 1859, Hugo urgently and passionately petitioned to save the life of John Brown, an American abolitionist sentenced to death.3 After false hope that Brown might be released, the abolitionist was hanged. Hugo mourned Brown’s death through the written word and art, creating a drawing which he titled Ecce — Behold. Ecce is a commanding image wherein the viewer is confronted with the injustice of Brown’s execution. A kind of divine light illuminates Brown, who otherwise hangs amidst still darkness, alone. He is a martyr.

Ecce challenged contemporary viewers to reconcile Brown’s horrific punishment with the righteousness of his cause. Those who knew Brown’s story would quickly realize that such a feat is impossible, for the punishment does not fit the crime. Hugo had Ecce distributed through prints, with proceeds from the sales going to various charities, “including those to provide medical supplies to soldiers in the Civil War.”

HAD I remembered this earlier, I would have included this 1866 pointing by Victor Hugo called Planet (maybe the inspiration behind Odilon Redon’s eyes?).

Planet (1866) by Victor Hugo

TIME (never enough of it) – had I had more time, I would have included this slide with Mark Lombardi‘s words. Courtesy Independent Curators International (maybe your library has a copy?).
Anything that might potentially show or threaten the tradition got my immediate attention: site-specific and transitory pieces, artist ideas, video, Beuys,Haacke, Merz, Buren, Manzoni, Nouvelle Reality, Fluxus, Situationists concrete poetry, conceptual art, and so on. However| am working in a most conventionalfabric with pencil and paper, making sketches, maquettes with which to proceed to the final picture, a very traditional method that no doubt goes back to the Renaissance, if not before…
| am interested in the structure, mechanisms, uses and abuses of power in the global political economy. Banks are an excellent place to study this phenomenon. … banks, whether in Hong Kong or Geneva or Cincinnati, provide a unique forum for the interplay of financial, corporate and political forces within the society at large. The basic social and economic priorities of life are debated and established here, in the financial sector; policy is then molded and sustained by financial means—loans, credits and so on. Government is only a tool for executing corporate policy. — Mark Lombardi (from Mark Lombardi, Global Networks, Independent Curators International) – Ed. No idea what M.L. meant by Nouvelle Reality.

TWO FRIENDS recently reminded me of two artists who worked in parallel:

• Otto Dix’s painting, War – he had been in the artillery in WWI – cf. also his 50 prints, The War.

• 

  The War Triptych by Otto Dix

  Käthe Kollwitz’s work against war.
  

BTW this was not the first time (nor is it the last) that I brought up “war.” In 2009, the School of Visual Arts in NYC had an event called,

Käthe Kolwittz’s poster: “Nevermore War”

Visions of War: The Arts Represent Conflict. It was the 23rd Annual National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists.

SECOND ADDENDUM

Because I was told that various programs depended on not “upsetting the state funding,” I decided not to present the iconic antii-war Guernica ,by another Spaniard, in the tradition of Goya, Picasso’s 1937 painting following the massacre in Guernica. I had thought I had enough challenging material without going there too.