art school is in crisis. the center cannot hold. we need to start holding classes in the streets. what is history good for? we don't know why we are here and we can't pay our bills. i am spending all of my time trying to tell students what history is good for and they don't see the connection. or they do, but all they feel is the hypocrisy. can't we have a town hall meeting? can't the generations of teachers start talking to each other and with each other to the students. fragmentation is everywhere, and yet there is a common thread. there is a way to make meeting. we are living in revolutionary times without the common tools for comprehending the changes afoot.
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Nicholas Cueva Or we could just drop it, and when it crashes... pick up the pieces we liked the most.
October 18 at 9:56pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung by make meeting i mean make meaning. but we DO need to make a meeting. i keep picturing a town hall style congretating outside the art institute. reassessing, slowly, stupidly, the point of being inside these walls while people continue rallying in the streets. there IS a point of being inside these walls, but if we can't articulate it to our students, we doomed.
October 18 at 9:56pm · Like · 3 people
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung cueva, who gets to pick up the pieces. the more i think about revolutions, the more i worry. if it really crashes, it crashes violently, this is one of the things history tells me.
October 18 at 9:57pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva You pick up the pieces you like, someone picks up ones they like. Why are we trying to hold the thing together, pretending it is some monolithic thing.
Maybe if we let go, it will still be what it was and what it is. History doesn't need us, it has always been. The future needs us, for we are the ones to make it.
October 18 at 10:00pm · Like · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung no, i owe history nothing, but without it, we are so stupid.
October 18 at 10:01pm · Like
Anna Jordan Huff MOLLY I'M WITH YOU!
October 18 at 10:01pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva No, not stupid... ignorant.
October 18 at 10:01pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung you feeling it out there in california, anna?
October 18 at 10:02pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva The information will always be there, and after what needs to happen happens, we can go back to the history... but maybe, right now, Alexandria needs to burn.
October 18 at 10:03pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva We can put aside our personal interest in history to look at the larger picture. We are part of that thing, that strand, and it'll be the life's work of some one else to parse out what we meant...
But to move as fast as we need to now, we can't deal with the baggage of constantly checking up Daddy.
We need to know it's already in us, in fact that's really all that is in us. Maybe we can't verbalize it, but fuck if we wanted to verbalize it, we would be writers.
October 18 at 10:07pm · Like · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung that is what i mean nicholas. history isn't "information," it is a lifeline - the only way we have a chance of seeing outside of late-model capitalism to other humans. otherwise how do we know ourselves to be human and sharing something. there is so much suspicion among people, and they wear masks with each other. i'm not talking personal interest, i'm talking solidarity.
October 18 at 10:08pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung i don't mean "daddy" when i say history.
October 18 at 10:09pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva I do
October 18 at 10:09pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva I can't look back anymore and see if I am either working with or against "Daddy". I just can't care anymore, and I think this is the feeling of your students too.
I can't go out dancing all prom night if I'm worried my parents worrying about when I'm going to come home.
October 18 at 10:13pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva i would argue that history is by it's definition the model of capitalism. It assigns worth and hierarchy. Ideas are worth more than others, are more desirable than others, "mean" more than others.
October 18 at 10:17pm · Like · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung its so strange hearing you say this nick. i think "daddy" would be corporations, global capital. the 1% of the population turning us into spectators and consumers for their gain. history, to me, is simply full of friends. and lessons, and insight about the present.
October 18 at 10:17pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva The only history we have access to is the history that collectors and their system. We only know the things that have been assigned value.
October 18 at 10:18pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung maybe you read the wrong histories. october magazine, susan buck morss, tj clark, howard zinn, lucy lippard...
October 18 at 10:19pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva If you know it, it's in a collection (or was in a collection and was "lost")
There has been countless works made and lost, without being assigned value. But THAT is life... real beauty isn't put in a vault to be gracefully looked at or put in a book and philosophized over... it is to be held and consumed as the thing in and of itself. The ideas we attach are just that.
October 18 at 10:21pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva The histories I am interested in are yours Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. William Sieruta's, Mario Romano's, Dana DeGiulio's, Antonia Gurkovska's, etc.
I loved them all, but fuck everyone else who isn't in my life (for time or class or distance), who I can't talk to and give to and receive from.
Death to the dead.
Luke 9:60a
"Let the dead bury their own dead..."
October 18 at 10:26pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung you are an adorable and passionate guy cueva! i hella disagree with you, but have to admire your heart and chutzpah!
October 18 at 10:28pm · Like · 1 person
Nicholas Cueva The past will still be there for me, but I need to run right now, and my love of the past is a burden too much for me (because I loved it too much, too early).
I want you to run with me, to push me and pull me.
I want you to push others to run too, at least until the dust settles.
Thanks Molly, I admire your chutzpah as well.
October 18 at 10:30pm · Like
Anne Harris Nicholas, I'm thinking about your comment: "i would argue that history is by it's definition the model of capitalism. It assigns worth and hierarchy. Ideas are worth more than others, are more desirable than others, "mean" more than others."
Certainly one side of history is as you say. But.... did you see that they recently discovered 100,000 year old paint? Did they even have money 100,000 years ago?
October 18 at 10:45pm · Like · 1 person
J Arthur Sunday A quote from a decidedly un-decided meeting of "occupy olympia" sums up why I'm apathetic: "but whose going to decide who brings the white board markers?". I'm so ashamed that I'm part of the 99%.
October 18 at 10:50pm · Like
Catherine Brooks All of a sudden it all seems so clear: we are living with relics, reiterating borrowed narratives, on the leash of adopted desires. I'd like to have townhall and Quaker style meetings on the topic of living in an artful way which is sometimes articulated through a pedagogical approach
October 18 at 10:52pm · Like · 1 person
Nicholas Cueva No, but the only way history research gets funded is through collections searches.
But I am saying, it is better to be like those people 100,000 years ago and to make it and do it and express life in the "now", than to worry about how the way that one is expressing fits into some false narrative of the world you are constructing from the scraps of history one's been privy to.
October 18 at 10:52pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva We only know SO LITTLE from the history of the world, we can't pretend that what we know is anything but scraps. Even ancient art, we only know the things that were made that survived their journey to this time.
How many paintings were never purchased and were thrown out? And of them, how many would have moved you to tears? We can't know... but that is the sorrow and the joy... I can imagine an ancient Phoenician woman who would have been my perfect soul mate, and she is... but SHE IS IN MY MIND... the past is just that, what we make of it now.
So until one has to sit and argue and fight, and until your love wanes and grows through real interaction, you are only making a pure reflection. The past is dead, and is only made alive by ourselves.
October 18 at 11:02pm · Like · 2 people
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung so funny, so strange, our differing relationships to history. i see what it is for you nick, and i DO push and pull everyone i see, and certainly my students all the time. i can't stand the present - feels like shopping, and instant gratification and heartbreaking cynicism and alienation and more shopping to plug holes. reading susan buck morss on malevich and the october revolution in russia in 1917, and the world, for me seems full of strange possibility again. it may be a scrap, but the fact that malevich painted figuratively again after the revolution, and pre-dated his paintings from the 1930's to make it seem as though he painted them in 1912 is compelling - makes me feel like time moves in multiple directions. like artists have a part to play in revolution, but that part is partially to pull away - to trace a private arc in the face of public politics.
October 18 at 11:04pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva The real interaction, is what I want. Fuck Walter Benjamin etc., I can't argue with him... I can't feel my ego shrink and grow in opposition to him like I can with you Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and Anne Harris. I can never offend him or bring him happiness, he is only a slate I can make comparisons on.
October 18 at 11:05pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva But history is more like shopping... you find the thing you like and you say it's yours.
October 18 at 11:06pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung more susan buck-morss "by not closing the gap between dream and reality, the artworks of the avant-garde left both dream and reality free to criticize each other."
October 18 at 11:06pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva But, and bless her, I have never spoken to Susan, and I can only hang my heavy coat of what I think those words mean in that coat-hook of a quote...
October 18 at 11:08pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung if the dream is social change, or utopian ideals of quaker-style meetings about politics, this dream held apart from but placed near the realities of social change can be startling.
October 18 at 11:08pm · Like
William Sieruta I dream to represent a portion of that heartbreaking cynicism you speak of, and, dear god, not that other shit. Really though, Is this town meeting merely a ploy to push for a 18 hour Crits ? : )
October 18 at 11:08pm · Unlike · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung of course, but i read them and say them to you and you argue with me and then we push further, instead of resorting to obscenities.
October 18 at 11:09pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung of course you do will, its called "negative critique" and there is a good long history of it in the avant-garde. in the flesh, you are actually something of a dreamer. i hate to break it to you.
October 18 at 11:10pm · Like · 1 person
Nicholas Cueva True, but why do we need her at all. You are good enough for me, I trust your faculties... and if you need to quote her, just steal it.
October 18 at 11:10pm · Like
William Sieruta yes
October 18 at 11:11pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva I know I am a dreamer... only a fool could wish to break from the past.... It is an impossible quest, but one worth trying
October 18 at 11:11pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva I'm not asking for us to be more realistic... I am asking for us to be more radical.
October 18 at 11:11pm · Like · 2 people
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung if i steal it, that ruins my argument, which is that history is useful to our lives. it makes me think harder and further. without susan et al, i am adrift in the midst of capitalism with no tools. i need tools. so do you nick. and now that you have them you think they are bunk. but you had to get them before you negated them. start teaching undergraduates and you will begin to feel me.
October 18 at 11:12pm · Like · 2 people
Nicholas Cueva I need tools too... Will is a tool I need. I have used him more completely than any text.
I don't think it's bunk... I just think we can take a break for a little while.
October 18 at 11:13pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva (Puns intended)
October 18 at 11:14pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung nick, i would like to suggest that we are on moving sidewalks coming from opposite places and passing in the middle. born and raised on the frontier as i was, the west coast, i learned everything backward. this is super radical, but i also felt lost.
October 18 at 11:15pm · Like · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung ha! will, how do you like being called a tool?
October 18 at 11:15pm · Like
Elijah Burgher Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.
October 18 at 11:15pm · Like · 3 people
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung my bike tires will puncture on the bones.
October 18 at 11:16pm · Like · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and really, if only we could make contact with the bones. we might have a better sense of our own impending deaths. might be a useful kick in the ass.
October 18 at 11:17pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva Molly, I was born in California... I have no culture.
October 18 at 11:17pm · Like
William Sieruta I knew I was a tool the second I entered this conversation
October 18 at 11:17pm · Like · 2 people
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung ooh. is that a burn? this stove is hot-cha-cha.
October 18 at 11:18pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and jacob, ugh. did you go to that meeting, or is this hearsay? it almost sounds too classic to be believed.
October 18 at 11:19pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung but then, you and will are charter members of the cynical society.
October 18 at 11:19pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva I thought I was a dreamer?
October 18 at 11:20pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLgYAHHkPFs&feature=related
John Lennon - Imagine
www.youtube.com
Video clip
October 18 at 11:22pm · Like ·
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung ha! nick you ARE a dreamer. jacob sunday, way up there is a cynic (cloaking a failed romantic, as usual)
October 18 at 11:23pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung btw cueva are you in nyc now?
October 18 at 11:25pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva Yep. Got a room in an apartment in Bushwick for $400, just had a job interview today, and another tomorrow.
October 18 at 11:26pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva LIVIN' THE DREAM!!!
October 18 at 11:26pm · Like · 1 person
William Sieruta is the term failed romantic redundant?
October 18 at 11:29pm · Like · 2 people
Stephanie Acosta ♥ ♥ ♥ I've been thinking this all fucking month.
October 18 at 11:32pm · Unlike · 2 people
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung the original romantics, 19th century, byron and wordsworth and baudelaire et al, were all radicalized by the revolutionary fervor of france, and baudelaire especially, by the end, was bitter and hopeless. i would say he was a failed romantic. similarly, with many people i know, they had idealistic notions of humans and our potential in this world, and when their hoped were dashed, they got cynical. i think both romanticism and cynicism are beside the point, and try for realism. but then we have to begin arguing about the real. its a difficult concept to pin down. except now. and here. and here. and now. but that's all over with, that moment is now history, and will begin to be inflected by representations.
October 18 at 11:40pm · Like
Nicholas Cueva But then we have William Blake, who expresses both and synthesizes them...
October 18 at 11:42pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung songs like "imagine" by john lennon aren't romantic for me. they are simply tear valves. like a faucet, i can turn on john lennon and get through the despair, moving on to more pragmatic approach. right now my pragmatic side says we need to be having all these conversations more publicly. i keep picturing a fishbowl. like on facebook only live, with five or six people in the middle arguing from different perspectives of the hierarchy of art school. to begin with. keeping with art school since that is where i find myself.,
October 18 at 11:43pm · Like · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung shame on you nick, drive over those bones!
October 18 at 11:44pm · Like · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6XUeYVfGJM
In My Blakean Year
www.youtube.com
Patti Smith's Ode to William Blake
October 18 at 11:44pm · Like · 1 person ·
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung thank you historical patti for mapping the roads.
October 18 at 11:45pm · Like
William Sieruta but instead your stuck with cueva ... i know the feeling
October 18 at 11:45pm · Unlike · 2 people
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung i bet you're feeling lonely will...
October 18 at 11:46pm · Like
Freddie Fagula best thread ever.
Wednesday at 12:31am · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung yes yes neff. i must sleep, but i have so much more to say and i agree... and also disagree...
Wednesday at 1:53am · Like
New Capital PERPETUAL PRESENT
Wednesday at 2:13am · Like · 1 person
Danica Favorito molly, and you guys, this is troubling. This thread is now the conformation for me of the chicago dispair that I've been hearing about within the past few weeks. Team rad is becoming team perdido, a reflection of more perdidos, i now realize. Whats going on? Why did it happen? Is this all a result of the newly heightened awareness of the 99% being the 99%? Did this begin last semester? Or is it sudden? Is it particularly SAIC, or is it int the air? It seems to have gone viral at this point whatever it is. I'm peering into it through the internet, but I don't feel it here, so Its particularily intreaguing and sad to be looking at it. I feel like a prison visitor, with a glass barior and a phone on each side, ya know. Maybe we all just need to believe in some magic:
Wednesday at 3:20am · Like · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung not despair danica. i say more in a while, after i wake up... hey new capital, we already have it. you like it?
Wednesday at 6:47am · Like
Anne Harris Regarding history--I want to know. I want to know all I can know, even if what I know is just a fraction of what there is to know. I don't want to have to reinvent everything and build on nothing. The historical picture is certainly corrupted, but corruption hides, it doesn't obliterate. It's up to us to seek out the truth. Start with Zinn.
Meanwhile I am very happy that what I do is 100,000yrs. old, (I only thought it was 30,000yrs. old). Anytime someone who is historically oblivious says painting's dead, I can say with even more assurance, "I doubt it."
Money, the history of greed and power (capitalism is just the tip)--well I'm with Zinn, and probably with you Nicholas.
Art school--I'm with you Molly.
Wednesday at 7:36am · Like
Nicholas Cueva http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2401#comic
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
www.smbc-comics.com
Wednesday at 9:38am · Like · 1 person ·
Jenny Cohen (hi molly!) Sometimes students can't see the connection you are trying to make until they realize what history is good for. fragmentation IS everywhere, and yet there IS a common thread. there are many common threads.
Wednesday at 11:27am · Like
Dana DeGiulio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcpWk2WKhEM
It's the Individual that's finished.
www.youtube.com
This is the final Howard Beale speech in the movie Network. Most people cite his...See More
Wednesday at 12:34pm · Unlike · 2 people ·
Nicholas Cueva Well, fuck that
Wednesday at 12:44pm · Unlike · 3 people
Jenny Cohen Oh my god Dana, I had no idea. I feel forever changed. and I love Faye dunaway.
Wednesday at 11:16pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung Anne, yes power and greed have always existed, but Capitalism, the system we live inside of, has made many new layers which I specifically hate. Living in poverty has been the fate of most of the humans on this earth forever, but in different periods of history they had solidarity with other poor people. Maybe we are beginning to feel that again, but part of capitalism's illusion game is that people aspire to having more - they vote their aspirations, not their interests. Poverty has no dignity. Looking at even the 19th ventury, it seems to me, from paintings, of pisarro for example, from writing, that poverty had dignity. That desire was not yet controlled at its emergence, into a desire to consume. People were not yet treated solely as consumers. It is this, more than poverty, that horrifies me.
Thursday at 11:55am · Like · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung Not that poverty doesn't suck, I am in 60,000 dollars debt, I have zero dollars cushion. This also sucks, but it would not be as bad if there wasn't so much garbage paraded before me as desirable purchases. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/story/2011-10-20/Poland-Gap/50839130/1
Gap opens 1st store in Poland as its enters region
www.usatoday.com
The move is the first step in Gap's plan to expand to central and eastern Europe, while the retailer closes dozens of stores in the U.S.
Thursday at 11:59am · Like ·
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-10-19/student-loan-debt/50818676/1
Student loan debt hits record levels
www.usatoday.com
The amount of student loans taken out last year crossed the $100 billion mark for the first time.
Thursday at 12:01pm · Like ·
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung USA Today doesn't tend to be my favorite news source, just saw these headlines on the street and thought them pertinent.
Thursday at 12:02pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung http://www.st-petersburg-life.com/st-petersburg/1917-russian-revolution
1917 Russian Revolution
www.st-petersburg-life.com
A brief account of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The causes, events and consequences.
Thursday at 12:03pm · Like ·
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung Perhaps the most important reason to think about history, in my opinion, is Richard Rorty's description of the "liberal ironist": "Rorty borrows Judith Shklar’s definition of liberals as people who view cruelty as “the worst thing we do.” But liberal ironists aren’t just sentimental, for unlike “liberal metaphysicians,” they have the strength to face up to the contingency, the arbitrary historical conditions of their “own most central thoughts and beliefs.” They’re able to dispense with the illusion of an ultimate metaphysical truth about the Self, Knowledge, or the Good which might usefully validate science, politics, and morals."
Thursday at 12:08pm · Like
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung but of course, even in the 19th century, the empathy with poverty was easier with the rural poor, who could be pictured in pastoral terms, and not the urban, who were pictured as prostitutes, agents, subjects...
Thursday at 12:30pm · Like
Jenny Cohen as an undergrad myself, this was a nice wave of history and art and anthro :)
Thursday at 2:41pm · Unlike · 1 person
Jenny Cohen anthro in that big wave o' history kind of way for me.
Thursday at 2:42pm · Like
Bobert Botchkiss Clomsen History, when it loses its normative authority over the present, can regain its smouldering alterity and, as you say, Molly, can cast a strange light on the limit-setting constructions within which we operate. In response to Nick's general trajectory: year zero, plough over the killing fields, sure. Er, but is it not unforgivible to forget? --not the monuments, but the strangeness they are made to bury? let us not subsume all the past under its commemoration. ......( 'Unforgivable' suggests an ultimate moral truth...and yet I am not ready to discard it. P.S. nice li'l thread)
20 hours ago · Unlike · 1 person
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung beautifully put robbie. i need you helping me articulate all the time. write something for conflict zine, won't you?
19 hours ago · Like
Tom Burtonwood move the campus to the horse on jackson and michigan. start from there.
19 hours ago · Like · 1 person
Jenny Cohen The Bowman/Spearman! Love them so much.
6 hours ago · Like