In the afterglow of a recent opening for the installation at workspace, after total darkness, I received a letter form a friend and collaborator about dark-sky parks and this post on BLDBLOG. Thank you Brian for sending me deeper into the black skies.

2009 is UNESCO’s international year of astronomy and The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) is continuing to promote awareness about light pollution. In Scotland, there is an effort underway to create Europe’s first “dark sky park.” This park would join the only two other such parks recognized by the IDA as having the necessary protections against light pollution and an exceptionally pristine nightscape. The other two parks are both in the United States (in Utah and northern Pennsylvania) and are joined by the sole dark-sky community in Flagstaff AZ.

BLDGBLOG makes an interesting connection, especially in light of the work done for the after total darkness book, between dark skies as cultural and natural property which are directly affected by our landscape and the shape of our community.

The concept of shaping the ground to frame and enhance the sky is not new (for instance, James Turrell’s Skyscapes are an architectural attempt to achieve “light effects and perceptual events” centered on a complex reframing of the sky). Nonetheless, the idea of rebuilding and landscaping an entire community specifically for the purposes of experiencing darkness is an exciting one – as is the idea of UNESCO, official protector of World Heritage Sites, attempting to safeguard dark skies as a “natural and cultural property.

Apparently, James Turrel also worked on the campaign to create the Flagstaff community standards for light pollution. What could be a better activist cause for an artist so dedicated to the profundity of subtle sensory shifts? For better or worse, Turrel’s skyspace in Claremont can be seen from within the light shadow of Los Angeles. The sunsets through this ocular are perhaps more striking than the night skies, but the play between built environment and astral luminance is still pretty provocative. Watch this video.

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” Thomas Jefferson

“The citizen called into being by a republic of freehold farms, is close cousin to the writer who built himself that cabin at Walden Pond. But along with such mainstream icons goes a shadow tradition, the one that made Jefferson skeptical of patents, the one that made even Thoreau argue late in life that every ‘town should have … a primitive forest …, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever,’ the one that led the framers of the Constitution to balance ‘exclusive right’ with ‘limited times.’ It is a tradition worth recovering.” Lewis Hyde

The contemporary threat to civilization is characterized by a declining commons, and it is two-fold:
1. Our common natural resources have been denigrated and destroyed.
2. Our cultural commons are severely jeopardized by corporate and individual greed in the form of copyright and intellectual property restrictions.
Although seemingly unrelated, these trends run along a poetic parallel with an increasing intensity in our state of Western hyper-capitalism.
Light has killed the night. Patents for plants. They own the spectrum, our stories our songs…

We are living through the anthropocene, and the global ecological disasters humans have wrought are now self-evident. Less clear, perhaps, is how a similar disregard for a healthy public sphere of culture affects us. All knowledge, and especially that manifest as material culture (such as works of art), derives its potency in exchange, compounds its power through collaboration and only proves valuable over time with successive reworkings. As such, the imperative to protect our cultural commons springs from the same simple logic that compels us to restore our earthly resources and preserve what remains of our natural public commons. Just as we have all lost the darkness of night, there is no good without a common good.

After Jon Sarkin had a stroke while playing golf in 1998, doctors removed part of his cerebellum in order to save his life. His world has changed dramatically since then, due in part to an emergent impulse to create artwork. His work cannot escape the story behind it, and the viewer cannot resist the desire to somehow “decode” some deeper significance, if not meaning.

Outsider art is about the inside, we suppose. Since it’s not informed by tradition, because it emerges as sometimes uncontrollable activity, because the artist doesn’t seem to be fully conscious of his motivation, and due to it’s almost childish innocence, this category (parallel to the canon) threatens to hold a mirror of truth. It’s very being, that inevitability, seems to mock the psycho-analytic attempts of a more conscientious conscious artistic impulse (from action painting to abstract expressionism and even minimalism) not to mention the well trod paths of painting as explanation and figuration. In Sarkins work, however, he executes another level of referential redirection: his explicit textual and iconic references to art historical figures and cultural relics create nonsense and pattern without forming content. As he says, “Most people are looking for a coherent pattern to something. They like things to make sense. So do I. But you know what? Too bad.”

Read the rest of this entry »

“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation, as to spare it the burden of existence? Or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood.”

Arthur Schopenhauer Sufferings of the World 1851

Springtime comes and a trans-cultural, almost universal celebration of procreation explodes around us. Every egg and tight bud threatens to become another metaphor for the unique beauty of pure potential, in life anew. As winter gives way to warmth and the days overtake the dark, it is tempting to find solace in this predictable and certain rebirth. “All is well, it has happened again,” the trees shake. As if some unity in a circle of life were enough to justify life itself. It is the logic of nature that all things happening naturally are good.

Read the rest of this entry »