INTHELIBRARY

from "Fetishism as Social Creativity" by David Graeber

Freud insisted that his patients were perfectly well aware that a shoe, for example, was not really a sexual object, let alone a maternal penis. It's just that this knowledge did not make any difference to them. One could say exactly the same thing of the businessman reading the Wall Street Journal and contemplating the latest adventures of pork bellies, futures funds, or "the market" in general. If one were to point out to such a person that pork bellies do not really "do" anything, he would no doubt groan or throw up his eyes at the painful obviousness of this observation. Of course they don't. It's just a way of speaking. At the same time he acts as if that way of speaking were in fact true. Awareness of the illusion makes no difference. In fact, one could go further: this is an illusion that manages to deceive its victims precisely by reassuring them that it is an illusion, that they are not deceived.

quoted from "Fetishism as Social Creativity" in David Graeber Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire.

from "Experimenting with the Real" by Paul Ardenne

"The notion of "experience" (from the latin experientia) stems from the term experiri, meaning "to try out." Experience, in its primary sense, refers to the process of actually going through something, a trial whose purpose includes broadening and enriching "the knowledge resulting from it."[1.] Through semantic derivation, experience also extends to the acquired practice of some activity as well as the entire set of the mind's acquisitions resulting form the exercise of our faculties (John Dewey's classic "learning by doing"). Inasmuch as it is etymologically related to "experiment", it also encompasses, as is well known in scientific circles, the fact of actually provoking a phenomenon with the intention of studying it."

[1.] "this definition can be verified in the Oxford dictionary"

Paul Ardenne "Experimenting with the Real; Art and Reality at the End of the Twentieth Century," Stephen Wright, trans. in Contemporary Practices; Art as Experience, Paul Ardenne, Pascal Beausse, and Laurent Goumarre, Paris, 1999, Editions Dis Voir

from "A Free Gift Makes no Friends" by James Laidlaw

"The point that a free gift has no power to bind was recognized, according to [F.] Pollock and [F.W.] Maitland..., from the earliest period in English law. No court would uphold gratuitous gifts of enforce gratuitous promises. From this arose the custom that the giver of a gift should receive in return some valueless trifle, just enough to make an exchange and therefore a legally valid transaction. Dan takes the opposite course: by remaining a resolutely free gift it remains free of obligation.

"While the concept of a "pure gift" has often been dismissed as naive and unsociological, that of a "pure commodity" has been shown more latitude. [James] Carrier..., in a general discussion of commodity exchange, makes the point that commodities are fungible. He then notes that this is not always equally so. Works of design, art, and craft are not interchangeable one for another, and it matters by whom they were made; yet they are exchanged as commodities. However, he continues, "these qualifications do not contradict the point that commodities are impersonal. Instead they show that not everything we buy and sell is a pure commodity."....Similarly, not all that we give and receive is a pure gift. I have suggested that almost nothing ever could be.. But in so far as the Jain case is a guide, it suggests that impersonality, if it is a feature of the commodity (which seems reasonable enough), is equally a feature of the free gift, rather than being, as incautious reading of Mauss has led us to expect, a dimension along which these two kinds of transaction are opposed. No doubt this explains why religious charity and philanthropy in all the great religions have repeatedly rediscovered the supreme value of the anonymous donation only to find that time and again donors have been more attracted to the benefits of the socially entangling Maussian gift, which does make friends."

quoted from James Laidlaw's discussion of the Jain tradition of Dan or alms-giving in "A Free Gift Makes no Friends" in Mark Osteen, ed. The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines. Routledge, London & New York, 2002

"Water Piece" by Yoko Ono

Water Piece

water

1964 spring

from Yoko Ono Grapefruit; A Book of Instructions and Drawings

Praxis performed Water Piece at ISE gallery in New York CIty on April 2, 2004.

They say: "Interpreting Yoko Onos Water piece, the following actions were created: we touched our fingers which were wet with holy water to the foreheads of participants. Then we said, You Are Loved, and embraced them. "

Yoko Ono Links

yoko-ono.com
a yoko ono box
i see life as the playground of our minds
yes yoko ono online
yoko ono music

Robert Barry

"First of all, words are always there, as we talk, read, I come across them. If you understand that there are words... not just talk..., not reading..., but that there are words. If you recognize that, then you are watchful for them and the words announce themselves to you, certain words do anyway, words that might be usable to me. They stand out from other words. They just stand out, even when I'm not looking for them. What do I do when I'm reading and a word stands out? I just put a little pencil mark next to it."

Robert Barry, quoted in "Spaces Liberated for Thought" by Joht T. Paoletti, in Ellen Seifermann, ed. Some Places to Which We Can Come: Robert Barry Works 1963-1975 Bielefield, Verlag und Gesamterhstelllung, 2003

"I'm talking about art - you know - what its function is in the world, what's really going on when it's there. It seems to me that the only thing that the artist does is to create a situation and we all kind of participate in it, like a relationship. And everybody gets out of it whatever they can."

Robert Barry, from an interview with Robin White at Crown Point Press, Oakland, California, June 1978.

Robert Barry Links

robert barry on ubuweb
interview with raimundus malasauskas