Monthly Archives: February 2017

peak: FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art

Posted on February 27, 2017 by Stephen Calhoun

In 2018 Cleveland will be the site of its first art triennial, FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. This video captures the initial public meeting at Transformer Station. Fred Bidwell is the executive director. He has put together a stellar team. This video is full of interesting hints and some very fast paced exposition and contextualization.

The theme of the triennial is: Cleveland. An American City. Something like 30+ international artists and 50+ artists from our region, NEO, will be presenting art in whatever mediums the curators choose to represent the theme; or, better to say, front the theme.

This event is literally a game-changer in a region. Cleveland, itself an art-filled city, and the region, have upwards–I guess–of 500+ working artists. Fortunately, others are already working to organize artists not admitted (through its curation process) into the triennial to exhibit in a kind of shadow triennial, FRINGE. The total amount of ‘art action’ to be unfolded in 2018 is unknowable today, yet, I have a glorious feeling Front International is going to turn out to be one of 2018’s signal art events in the world.

It’s going to be a lot of fun and a learning experience to take it all in.

Soteria Vir (Stephen Calhoun, 2016)

As for my own aspirations, I don’t have any. Cleveland has lots of great artists! And my own art is rigorously out-of-step. (What formally trained artist–I’m self-trained–in their right mind would intentionally aim to cause visual epiphanies for all ages?) I hope I get to help peddle t-shirts, or do something useful.

(However, now that I reflect on these matters, my art does literally recycle bits of Cleveland that I pick up off the ground or buy from local garage sales, so, in fact, much of my art is full of, made up of, this American city. So, there’s that!)

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Posted in art, artists, Cleveland, speculations | Tagged FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art | Leave a comment

Synchronicity and Wheels

Posted on February 23, 2017 by Stephen Calhoun

Monday, February 13, I was driving to Wadsworth, listening to a CD, thinking about my livelihood as an artist–such as it is–and a tune started up from my single most favored rock record of all time, The Gilded Palace of Sin, by The Flying Burrito Brothers.

The song was Wheels.

We’ve all got wheels to take ourselves away
We’ve got the telephones to say what we can’t say
We all got higher and higher every day
Come on wheels take this boy away
We’re not afraid to ride
We’re not afraid to die come on wheels take me home today
So come on wheels take this boy away

And when I feel my time is almost up
And destiny is in my right hand
I’ll turn to him who made my faith so strong
Come on wheels make this boy a man
We’re not afraid to ride
We’re not afraid to die come on wheels take me home today
So come on wheels take this boy away
Come on wheels take this boy away

The record was released February 11, 1969. I would hear it for the first time at the Amazing Dynamo Man’s house, draped over his bed, in September 1970. He, Jamie Cohen, and I, had just met, just begun tenth grade as first year sophomores at Hawken School in Cleveland. We fell into each other like rain drops into the ocean.

Me, Hoon, atop the Amazing Dynamo Man, 1972

Forty eight years later, I’m reflecting on art matters having to do with commerce, Wheels comes on, I glance out my car’s driver-side window, and see a flatbed truck passing me on I71.

It’s badged with this logo:

I chuckle, then laugh heartily. The moment was not just a gilded moment of synchronicity, it was a text book synchronicity!

Shit.

“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not.” ? C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Kabir’s Sobriety 2016 Stephen Calhoun

A synchronicity worthy of the term is required to be deeply disturbing, or deeply disruptive, or deeply derailing. What I have to offer are my happy delusions! I’ve been revisiting Kabir. #326 of his Bijak:

No customers for the word:
the price is high.
Without paying you can’t get it,
so move on by.

In January I had a very simple dream–simple as far as its arc.

(1) I’m on the side porch of a gothic church. It’s a fall day, and the church’s porch is the scene of a rummage sale. I’m picking little costume jewelry pieces up and putting each one back down. I notice some nice oak chairs and old brass floor lamps. I say to the lady, “You have some nice stuff.” She answers back, “I see you’re not in a buying mood, but the prices are right.”

(2) Walking down the steps, with the front of the church rising to my right, I cross a lawn and walk toward an old Chevy station wagon. I walk to the driver’s side and their is a man with a hat, and his wife is to his right, and his son and daughter are in the back seat. The rear has suitcases. I think to myself, ‘It’s an all American family.’ The man asks if I will help him get unstuck. I put my shoulder to the frame of his window to push, and, without much effort I push and feel his car rise a bit and become unstuck.

(3) The car gathers speed and then veers slightly across the front lawn of the church. It crashes into the wall of the sanctuary. I run toward it, but am halted when I see a bloodied brown panther or mountain lion, seemingly crushed between the grill and limestone wall, pull itself out of its predicament and jump over the hood. It stands on the grass and shakes its head once vertically, runs off.

Yes.

My favorite track from my favorite record.

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Posted in adult learning, experiential learning, music, personal, psychology, self-knowledge, serendipity | Tagged synchronicity | Leave a comment

PSA: Bias

Posted on February 21, 2017 by Stephen Calhoun

For my own purposes I make the following differentiations netween operational modalities of ordinary language argument.

(1) OBJECTIVE arguments based in facts and positive propositions and deduction
(2) ABDUCTIVE arguments based in explanation drawn from repeated experiences and inductions from these experiences
(3) IDEOLOGICAL arguments based in alignment or misalignment with first principles
(4) PERFORMATIVE arguments based in attracting and persuading support, without reference to objectivity or explanatory abductions

Explanation, or description may be substituted for argument. There can be formal or informal mixtures of the four modalities.

None of the above help with a Performative Argument. A Performative Argument is insulated from the deconstructive power posed by an evaluation of its biases, deficits of logic, and its loose couplings to the ideological/abductive/objective.

From this, it follows that a lie is best rendered in a performative argument because this setting gives the lie the best chance to be optimally convincing. The hallmark of performative argument is its implicit perception management.

All conspiracy theories which propose, and are contingent on, successful hidden structures, secret coordination, and occulted intent, are always performative theories. I don’t know of any exceptions.

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Posted in adult learning, folk psychology, Gregory Bateson | Tagged abduction, critical thinking | Leave a comment

Pure Experience

Posted on February 17, 2017 by Stephen Calhoun

Organized Detritus (2017) Stephen Calhoun

What is left of experience if from it are erased feeling it, thinking it, feeling about it, thinking about it?

I’ve been reflecting on the paradox of mindfulness. Mindfulness, over the last several years, is among the hottest trends in management and organizational “self-improvement.”

It seem to me partly counter-intuitive in that mindfulness’s site is individual consciousness, whereas both managers and organizations tend to strongly focus their collective consciousness on some master plan given by holistic “master” assumptions.

Yet, there is the lower level paradox found in the second/third order appreciation of mindfulness, which is: to speak of it is not to be it.

Carl Manchester reads Chapter 2 A World of Pure Experience, from:

William James: Essays In Radical Empiricism (download via archive.org)

Pure experience is the centerpiece of a larger, radical empiricism, one that rejects the assumptions that created the epistemic gap between experience and reality in the first place. This gap is predicated on “an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known,” James says, and this fake problem is his first target. The history of philosophy has shown that all sort of theories have been invented to overcome this gap, he says. Some theories put a mental representation into the gap, common-sense theories left the gap untouched, believing that our minds could just make the leap and, he tells us, and the Transcendentalists brought their Absolute in to perform this epic task. James and Pirsig, on the other hand, say that subjects and objects are not the conditions that make experience possible. Instead, they have been carved out. As James puts it, inner and outer are just names for the way we sort experience. They are linguistic affairs, products of reflection, concepts derived from experience. To supposed that these terms mirror Nature’s own divisions or otherwise correspond to pre-existing ontological categories is to reify these concepts. Under our radical empiricists, subjects and objects are stripped of their metaphysical, ontological status and otherwise demoted to the rank of mere concept – thereby eliminating Cartesian dualism and replacing it with an experiential monism. For the radical empiricist, experience and reality amount to the same thing. This is the context in which James and Pirsig make their claims about pure experience or the pre-intellectual cutting edge of experience. Pure Experience and Dynamic Quality February 16, 2012 by David Buchanan partiallyexaminedlife.com

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Posted in adult learning, cultural contradictions, experiential learning, folk psychology, psychology, self-knowledge, social psychology, organizational development | Tagged cybernetics, mindfulness, second order cybernetics | Leave a comment

Opposite Squaredance

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Stephen Calhoun

For the fourth year in a row, I was happy to work with Wadsworth Public Library’s fine staff on their staff day. We did a three phase exploration over the afternoon. First, we did a Taoist Walk in two snaking, quiet, single file lines. Second, we owned up to and affirmed one half of an opposite, taken from an inventory of polarities. Finally, we did some down-and-dirty scenario solving, where intradepartmental groups trained their expert attention on three very complicated, real-world scenarios.

From the squareONE: experiential toolmaker page on my work with libraries.

Working solo, or in partnership with Daniel Slife, squareONE formulates a brain trust focused on supporting leadership, and vitalizing visionary goals in public libraries.

We support leadership and ambitious organizational goals by helping build sustainable human capacity in organizations.

Our approach can be distilled: we use deeply intentional experiential inquiries to help leaders and staff and stakeholders interrogate the core propositional bindings, mission, and history of the institution. Then, we work to help the leadership and staff reinvigorate and reintegrate these necessary core bindings, build sustainable new initiatives, recommit to a collaborative culture focused on lifelong learning and care.

squareONE’s unique capabilities are the result of joining together Daniel’s expertise in daily, practical and humanistic institutional leadership in the public library, with Stephen’s innovative skills in guiding transformative learning.

Our developmental tools are not like those found in normative organizational and leadership development. Their fundamental appreciative thrust is directed toward leveraging self-awareness for the sake of sustaining and strengthening the library’s mission. Nothing ever gets pulled off any shelf. Everything is purpose-built and fit to address mundane and audacious objectives.

Alignment matters. To be aligned with squareONE’s approach, a public library has to be dedicated to the classical view of the American Public Library. This view broadly holds the library to be a civically engaged institution devoted to supporting the emancipatory power of the book, the written word, culture, lifelong learning, and, above all: devoted to deep care for the community and its citizens.

squareONE stands opposed to the turning of the American Public Library into a vending machine of services, for which the book itself is a receding resource.

contact: Stephen Calhoun (216) 269-5568

I began working with libraries in partnership with the late Kenneth Warren in 2014. Mr. Warren hired me and asked me to create an anthropology portfolio at Lakewood Public Library in 2005. I worked there until late in 2006.

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Posted in Libraries & Librarianship, self-knowledge | Leave a comment

Cyclin’

Posted on February 14, 2017 by Stephen Calhoun

The foolish person tries to ignore the phenomenal facts of life simply because he cannot learn the logical theory which explains them. With all the logic at our command, we may reason out of the domain of possibilities everything that may be called a theoretical explanation of the cosmic rhythm which produces the various cycles of life, but we cannot with the same logic and reasonableness negate the facts which have been observed. H. Spencer Lewis Self-Mastery and Fate
With the Cycles of Life [pdf]

(With a few changes this passage from 1929 may be transformed into a cybernetic proposition. In turn, this proposition proves essential to understanding the problem of noise and signal and cycles.)