Waldo Cheerio / Texts
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I had a conversation with Harry Lee (and Levitating Potato) about this duel. Here was our dilemma in choosing whom to vote for:
[12:59:40 AM] Harry Lee says: Who are you voting for?
[1:00:39 AM] Waldo says: It's a tough call, they are radically different approaches to SF0
[1:01:18 AM] Waldo says: Lincoln, as always, is raw and somehow captures the struggle of human endeavor
[1:01:33 AM] Waldo says: Lincoln embodies "finding a way"
[1:01:45 AM] Waldo says: but Burn Unit -- his completion is remarkably elegant
[1:01:53 AM] Waldo says: Certainly different approaches to the task.
[1:02:26 AM] Waldo says: I could imagine his video being part of an advertisement for Home Depot or something, its gorgeous
[1:02:31 AM] Levitating Potato says: I agree... I was in the mood to vote for the elegant simplicity
[1:03:28 AM] Waldo says: One shows a man, grooving on some saws, there for all the world to see. The other, the creator is a mystery, absent, putting his work on a pedastal for us to marvel at.
[1:04:07 AM] Waldo says: I don't know which I want to encourage
[1:04:15 AM] Waldo says: encourage people to be like Lincoln
[1:04:23 AM] Harry Lee says: Or BU.
[1:04:30 AM] Waldo says: or encourage people to strive for the perfection of BU's work
[1:04:38 AM] Harry Lee says: (nod)
[1:05:20 AM] Waldo says: I'm just not sure which is the goal of SF0. Making people who are unconstrained by society, or whether those people are a means towards to ends of the beauty such people can create.
[1:05:36 AM] Harry Lee says: Both.
[1:05:54 AM] Waldo says: Is SF0 a workout for the person, making them freer, or is it art, and the expression should be beautiful and shared with the world?
[1:06:08 AM] Harry Lee says: Again, in my opinion... Both. :)
On that basis, I am not going to impact the outcome of the duel, in that I am voting for both of you. As a personal note to Lincoln however, I am very impressed. I didn't think you could find a more seemingly dangerous and eerily beautiful task than a photo at the bottom of the sea, cinder blocks in hand. But playing music mostly naked in a room full of swinging circular saws and power tools... I'll be damned if you haven't outdone yourself.
I suspect that if you want to find Waldo, you would start by attending Journey to the End of the Night LA (if you think you can catch me), or by keeping an eye on upcoming praxis. As new participants, please let us know whether these are eupraxia or dyspraxia, we'll take all the guidance we can get.
The link in question is http://sf0.org/Lank/Invent-a-New-Word/
I am very pleased you think so. I've just added some media to our submission directly, so we don't show up as a .txt submission. Pamda is on the case to upload a few of our extraneous images, including a very apropos pamphlet we found on-board the train warning passengers against accepting strange gifts from strangers. I kid you not.
Luckily, the judicial system has, at long last acceded to our demands. I am free to invoke the memory of Vanna White in all future praxes as desired:
http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/989/989.F2d.1512.90-55840.html
I have to jump in here about defining someone else as art running afoul of our notions of autonomy or of art. The definition I found most useful that separates pornography and art has been a subjective one, dependent on the audience, without being so useless as an "I know it when I see it" standard. It was always a matter of possession to me -- pornography you possess and take dominion of, as men typically do through sexual conquest, whereas art you appreciate without needing to make it your own and a part of you. I liked that working definition because it meant a group of adults could stand around looking at images, and one such group would consider the painting artistically and deem it so, while the other would revile and dream of it longingly and make of it pornography, and the definition be consistent. In the same way, for some people a Denny's commercial of sizzling sausage bouncing out of the pan is pornographic, and the literary trick of using feasts and food-a-plenty in place of sexuality in children's tales as an alternate apetite for the hero (or "lecherous" villain) still jives. It makes the themes of Francis Dolarhyde eating The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun comprehensible to those of us without degrees in psychology (or psychonomy).
At this point though, I hit upon my problem -- pornography is dependent upon the notion of making a person into a sexual object. As a feminist myself, I take great issue with the majority of the practice and industry of peddling female flesh as a multi-billion dollar industry, and even more-so with the mindset of those who treat women accordingly, even women treating themselves solely as objects. But objectifying a person sexually is not itself a negative thing. I am against the culture of female subjugation founded on the ideal of the objectified woman, but the act itself is not "bad" in itself. And yet somehow making someone else art is.
I'm struggling to decide whether a person can be art, and if they can what my framework is missing. The discussion of art being limited to representations when art cannot be a platonic ideal itself is completely wrong to me, when as a mathematician I know both a painting of a triangle, and triangleness itself devoid of representation are both art. An equation is not art for it's series of lines on a page, but as a thing that is eternal and real in a way arguably more real than you or I or the universe we live in. e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0 is the most beautiful thing in mathematics as a thing itself, not as the representation. The most beautiful representation in math is surely Tupper's Self Referential Forumla. Art cannot also be whatever an artist deems is art, because Art as a principal reflects social understandings and interplays between the intention of the artist and the reception by the audience, or perhaps because we can call things art without knowing the intent of the creator, whether there even was a creator, or in total absence of an artifice that can be said to have a creator (as I deny the existence of a God, let alone her profession as an artist).
At this point I can only imagine that someone proclaiming someone else to be art strikes unease through us because of the impulse to assume they are possessing the person in so doing, and thereby violating both the person and the notion of art itself as something appreciated from afar. Maybe this just reflects my personal inability thusfar to honestly separate an appreciation of a person from the egotistical drive to be important to them and cyclically be appreciating a part of myself.
The best I can do is consider this under the guise of authorial intent, which is only a partial answer. It is very difficult to consider something that was intended to be pornographic as art, without considering the work in terms of the artistic choices and so forth that accompanied the making of the pornographic piece. Assuredly we could sit around and analyze Deep Throat as an artistic commentary on perceptions of sexuality and mortality, or as a commentary on elbows and dandelions if we cared to, but the piece itself wouldn't be art so much as the piece as viewed through our analysis is art, and in that case is only so by our transmuting the artist's intent into some other element of the intent -> message -> medium -> interpretation -> understanding chain of events. Making the artist's intent to possess and dominate Linda Boreman into a part of the message, and imputing to the deranged director Gerard Damiano an intent to make the commentary is twisting the piece out of context, and making it just another Shakespeare in the Bush.
So then, calling a person Art may seem wrong to us, because we don't believe that in so doing any "artist" intends their labeling of a person or their body as art is done without a pornographic and possessive intent? We can paint an apple and not want to eat the apple, we can paint a person and not want to fuck the person, but can we call a person themselves art without belying an appreciation that is personal and therefor possessive? In theory we can, and there are people I am willing to believe could do it, but do those of you who this classification has bothered find the problem is that you can't believe this is the case for Lincoln?
Personally, from what I have seen of Lincoln's taskings, and my recollection of meeting him when he had not slept in days and was ragged around the edges from exhaustion, Lincoln is possibly one of those people who can point to a person, call that person art, and not be putting his foot in his mouth. You're still culpable for unleashing a can of worms, but here is the sort of place I could imagine opening that can, and not bringing safety goggles and a whole lot of prefacing and accounting for yourself before doing it either.
I had to do a google search for the actress, and check both Firefly and Serenity before I was sure these were photos of you rather than sockpuppetry. Outstanding.
While I already completed Leave Clues in a tandem double-praxis, Pamda is considering leaving a trail of clues for our fantastically cooperative photographers, and I'll help (if she lets me) just for the satisfaction of a task well done. Pamda knows her way around a trail of clues, believe you me.
Getting one-upped by your mother when it comes to the internets (serious business) is a pretty good way to get burned on a task that doesn't go the way you expect. You laid a good trap, but not every task can be for epic win, and you take your punches in good humour. Kudos!
I'd never heard of human labyrinths before, but now I have to try them. Please upload a photo to go along with your proof, just so your praxis doesn't show up with a damnable .flv icon next to it -- you deserve way more votes than you've received so far for working out how to do this, and choosing a "this" that is so enticing for us to watch. Kudos.
This tasking is one of the most remarkable efforts I've seen. The entire site seems to be about our freedom to do more than what is asked of us, offered to us, or even portrayed as within our available options as human beings. Seeing a man decide he wants to touch the sea floor, devises a way to do it with abandoned materials and a cinderblock (cinderblock!) mechanism on his day off, that is not something anyone will ever tell you to do, or even suggest is possible. Even in the encouraging framework of sf0, I would have tried to work out a sensible plan to get down there that any reasonable person could have been convinced was sane -- found cinderblocks would not be part of such a plan.
The sense of community and care for one another shown by the comments asking Lincoln to not take risks, or at least encourage even worse risks with his tales of bravado, that is great, but swimming against a rip-tide seems to be what this is all about. Anyone who served as a lifeguard knows that people drown from battling riptide more than anything else, but Lincoln figured he'd try anyway because 10-mile walk be damned. It wasn't really foolish, he had a back-up plan to float on his back and swim north if he tired out; depite this being what conventional wisdom points to (or even common sense and a preservation instinct), Lincoln decided that wasn't what he was going to try first. He swam against the pacific rip tide. He won. Bravo, Lincoln.
Next time though, pick a symbol of personal triumph that'll drown fewer copy-cats. We want to share in your glory and it just ain't fair when you lord superhuman swimming over us landlubbers.