What’s the Deal With Curators?

by C.J. Stahl

In Roland Barthes' From Work to Text, the author draws distinctions between what he refers to as work and text. While a work may result as the product of creative energies, it is bound to its physicality. The work exists in and of itself, we may consider genre novels in thinking of work. The text transcends the physicality of the surface of the page. The text is traversal in its existence, originating in dialogue prior to any particular work; it is not constrained by authorship. Furthermore, the text finds continuity in the active dialogue of others. While there are other particulars Barthes uses to distinguish between work and text, the traversality of text and its rejection of filiation, speak directly to the inherent nature of text. As an artist, Barthes' thoughts have moved me to consider the relationship of the artist's practice to that of curatorial practice. 

What is the function of the curator within the context of Barthes essay? While the traditional role of providing a theoretical framework to a particular exhibition may still stand as an expectation, one may be inclined to accept the notion that curators are artists working within a theoretical media. Likewise, it is becoming common for artists to dabble in curating exhibitions. Is the artist-as-curator different from the curator-as-artist? Some might argue yes, insinuating the artist-as-curator is first a producer of the art/art object, but if we are to conform to Barthes’ notion of text, it is not the object that carries meaning but its context. Is it time to renegotiate the titles of artist and curator? Will the text persist without the curator, or is it time to do away with the title of artist?

You can find a full text version of From Work to Text at:
http://areas.fba.ul.pt/jpeneda/From%20Work%20to%20Text.pdf

Blogs Are Easy

by C.J. Stahl

This truly is the digital age. With Amazon “generously” allotting eligible Kindle e-books to be shared for a one time period of fourteen days, it seems like the tradition of actual book sharing is coming to a slow death. That’s not to say you can’t borrow Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus off a book buddy for a period of time until they forget about the arrangement and you walk away book in hand, scot-free. It does mean, however, that all of you fancy individuals with the newest, weirdest book readers will be substantially limited in your sharing abilities. I’ve never been good with, or cool enough to, keep up with the latest in technology, but I did just start using Google Reader, so today we’re going to talk about blogs.

Blogs are sharable, can be incredibly content-heavy and/or just really enjoyable. Let me take a moment to shamelessly ask you to PLEASE SHARE THIS BLOG! Okay back to business. Few trivial things truly make me feel as good as when I’m able to recommend a blog to someone who’s never heard of it before, or when someone shares a blog with me that I end up loving. This of course is dependent primarily on two necessary factors: the blog is actually good and it is relevant to the individual’s interests. As I’d stated earlier in regard to technology, I’m never at it’s cusp. Throughout my life this has also been true for most art and culture as well. When I really think about it, most of the art, music, and culture that I truly identify with has come as some type of inheritance.

Most of us were probably taught long ago about the importance of sharing. It’s likely, in these silly economic times, that deep in our hearts we are at once scared to share for fear of running out of our necessary resources. Now, we have been moved to share, because it’s getting easier and easier to see that we are all in this together (at least 99% of us are in this together) not to mention we want our voice heard and we have realized we need to share to have this happen.  
So without further adieu, here are a few of my favorites blogs:

Edward Winkleman is incredible, hands down. He is the owner/gallerist of Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea (http://winkleman.com/ this is the gallery site), and he is incredibly close to his blog. You can typically expect one substantial post a day, with the exception of weekends, ranging in topic from contemporary art and its institutions to politics. Other than being wonderfully intelligent, the greatest characteristic about Winkleman’s commentary is that there is always a well developed sense of personal ethics that you can pick up on, whether he’s discussing the Occupy Wall Street movement or the commercial art market (in which he is quite comfortable critiquing and in giving his insider perspective). If you aren’t already familiar, do yourself the favor and check out Ed’s blog. http://www.edwardwinkleman.com/

Art Fag City, voted the Best Art Blog by the Village Voice for 2010 is another excellent choice. Led by widely published editorial director Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City’s focus is New York art news and reviews. This could sound limiting but AFC has a pretty wide range with a lot of fresh, young voices writing for it. Multiple posts a day and a “links” post from Ms. Johnson will add up to enough daily content to make your eyes burn. http://www.artfagcity.com/

Hyperallergic describes themselves probably best: “a forum for serious, playful and radical thinking about art in the world today.” I just recently started following this blog, and so far I have not been disappointed. Hyperallergic covers a broader geographical range than Winkleman and AFC, and tends to be more inclusive of what can be recognized as subcultural influence. If you enjoy both high contemporary and that which is influenced by street art and illustration, Hyperallergic does a fantastic job of covering various trends seamlessly. Multiple posts a day and a touch of mouthy commentary makes reading about sometimes heady work really refreshing. http://hyperallergic.com/

If you’d like to share any of your favorite blogs with the staff at IN THEORY, we’d love to receive your suggestions. Feel free to email us at pafagradjournal@gmail.com
Who knows, maybe we’ll put together one of those lists.

Jayson Musson: The Language Weapon

*This Thursday, November 10th, 2011, The Visiting Artists Program will be hosting Jayson Musson in the Hamilton Auditorium of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he will speak at 11:45am.  Email visitingartists@pobox.pafa.edu for more information.

"Mastery of language affords remarkable power."

“The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anti-colonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”

“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo.  I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia.  I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.”

These three quotations come from two major texts of psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, and Black Skin, White Masks.  His lifelong searing criticism of colonialism is as relevant today, and we ought to see artist Jayson Musson's project as an illuminated subplot of Fanon's work.

Musson, a.k.a. Hennessy Youngman is, to borrow a colleague's phrase, like the Ali G. of the art world.  Except where Ali G. thrives off the veil of being the stupid guy in a room of 'important' people in order to highlight his victims' prejudice, Musson intersperses an ignoramus 'hood' persona with moments of lucid, shaming intellectual diatribe.  To speak to the first Fanon quote from above, Musson's project grabs hold of language as a weapon to be mastered and controlled.  Language is a subject itself in his performances.  Ali G's is a mastery of social behavior: his comments are the seeds that unleash the clumsy human folly around him.  The domino effect takes its course.  It is a brilliant act of foresight and leaded questioning.  But Musson does not have the same privilege that Sacha Baron Cohen has, for the art world is a subtler beast for a provocateur.  There are very few white supremacist skinhead arts leaders; not many campaigning pro-life gallerists; relatively few extremist evangelical artists and curators.  Musson has to go straight for the throat in his online Youtube channel Art Thoughtz and most recently in his satirical audio tour, titled The Grand Manner in the Historic Landmark Building at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  His comments on certain paintings, many of which depict events or people in early American history, include, "The cross is boss", and "A white man gotta do what a white man gotta do" (on the slave dealings of Governor Morris and Robert Morris).

His most recent public appearance was at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.  This particular comment  made by Hennessy was answered with a fairly icy silence:   

"Museums should heed this trend [of alternative marketing plans] and begin aligning themselves with causes in order to work against decades of bad PR from institutional critique which have painted museums as self - interested institutions, a place where hedge fund managers donate their art collection in order to boost the value of their own collection, and that’s bad, that’s not good…"

In conversation with the second Fanon quotation above, Musson's indictment of the greedy runoff bred within the museum is particularly apropos in light of the ongoing Occupy protests.  One of the problems with these protests, however, is their vague handling of language and message.  At this stage in the game, language is not being used to its maximum, debilitating effect, and neither is action.  Fanon says "no matter how devastating the consequences may be" action must be taken.  His project was filled with irreconcilable rage; he never hid it.  Musson's institutional critique begins to get at that sensibility, but I wonder which end he is after exactly: comedic satire, or foundational change?

Musson is black, and this is the central tension in his project: his exaggerated routines push us to ask the question that embodies the stain of racial exclusion in art: why should the Art World (read upper middle class, educated, white people) trust the art history lessons of a rapping, Ebonics- speaking black man from the hood of Philadelphia?  That we ask this question illuminates our own conditioned prejudice and the inherent racial and socioeconomic inequalities in the commercial and academic quarters of fine art.  Like Fanon, Musson's character is defiantly proud of his blackness, and highlights the gap in understanding between the intellectual white man and black culture; his caricature widens that threshold.  But where Fanon describes the black man in "total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth", Musson seems to say through his alter ego Hennessy that urban black culture is, through most lenses, a complete aberration in the Art World.  We are forced into the opportune position of reexamining where, and from whom, we get our information from, be it a scholar, a text, or a museum label. 

Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

Ibid, Black Skin, White Masks, Editions de Seuil: Paris, 1952

http://www.youtube.com/user/HennesyYoungman

Announcements: Opening Reception for 'Out in Out' this Friday

Courtesy of the Facebook post by Master of Fine Arts Candidate Katrina Funk:


What is Drawing?
It is our wish that each drawing will consist of the ingredients that are similar to those of human beings – an epidermis, an outside, a surface - that introduces and reveals a life being lived within, enticing and
encouraging others to look harder and inquire more, to better know the interior – the energy, personality, mind, spirit, and soul – so that the life-
affirming dynamic relationship between what-we-can-see and what-we-cannot-see in your drawings will inspire in us something about those same qualities in all of us - how we look because of who we are and who we are because of how we look – just like drawing, just like art – Out In Out.

Featured Artists:

Jannalyn Bailey
Phillippa Beardsley
Jessica Braiterman
Matej Branc
Gretchen Diehl
Diana Dodson
Kirsten Fisher
Katrina Funk
Eric Huckerbee
Adam Lovits
Ana Maria Gomez Lopez
April Loveday
Sofya Mirvis
Cynthia Oswald
Sarah Peoples
Ana Rankin
Brian Spies
Susan Stromquist
Chelsea Thoumsin

Come to MBN Studios this Friday from 6pm-10pm for the opening reception!
725 North 4th Street, Philadelphia PA 19123

Art Without Clothes: Public Displays in Philadelphia

A large-scale historical object with metaphorical value, rearranged to be aesthetically captivating, and reused in a way that supports politically correct global movements (ie. going green), set in the plaza of a fine arts institution of considerable symbolic grandeur: check.

I say this not to belittle nor mock PAFA alumnus Jordan Griska's "Grumman Greenhouse" public sculpture in the Academy's Lenfest Plaza, but to argue how expected and easy its conditions are.  It is even, for a simulated plane crash, cheerful.

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp stunned the Society of Independent Artists when he anonymously submitted a urinal turned upside down and signed 'R. Mutt' for exhibition.  All works would supposedly be displayed, and he resigned from the organization when his piece was refused.  Duchamp's "Fountain" was a brazen gesture of institutional critique and a blow to the artist as godly creator (and by relation the work of art as unique, aesthetic masterpiece).  It was officially the first in the genre of Ready Made sculpture.  Griska's reappropriation of the 18,000 pound Grumman S2F tracker military aircraft is a fascinating foil to Duchamp's heroic display.  Where Duchamp's was, in a sense, anti-aesthetic, Griska's is just the opposite: the plane, as if it were an art school manikin being positioned into something evocative and art-worthy, is reassembled to look like it is gracefully diving head first into the ground.  It really takes on an anthropomorphic quality, with the bend of the cockpit resembling the broken neck of a bird.  The wings twist in a way that would not be physically likely in the event of a real crash.  It is important that Griska had no intention of rendering a crash at all; rather, his project is one of transformation.  The point, in contrast to Duchamp's, is that the Grumman S2F is dead scrap (it would have been thrown out had Griska not purchased it) in its original form and must be laboriously changed to resurrect it.  Where with "Fountain" the artist as god-craftsman is dismantled, in "Grumman Greenhouse" it is inevitably reaffirmed, in a poignant way; Griska literally becomes artist-as-savior.

What I am missing in this piece is any public recognition of irony that these conditions necessitate.  The plane is a tour de force of formalist arty language: perspective, linearity, sumptuous curves, dramatic negative space.  To add to this, a sustainable garden will be created within the plane's interior.  Life is beautiful.  But it isn't.  Innovation and transformation is absolutely essential to sustain mankind's ever-larger footprint, but art, by its nature, has the peculiar privilege to not do this (as Duchamp made clear).  It can look backwards, forwards or just stay still, and I think Griska's project- and its reception- does not take this into account.  There is something inevitably morbid about the installation: the plane was an anti-submarine aircraft flown during the Cold War, among the most unnerving periods for Americans of all ages; it is now depicted in a contorted landing but without any signs of damage at all, and delicious and pretty flora will be growing inside soon enough; after dark, it is eerily ghost like, a shipwreck of sorts, and we stare at it with the inevitable curiosity one experiences during a traffic accident.  These are fascinating qualities of the piece that have not been tackled within the window of commentary and media exposure thus far.

In "Living Room War", author Michael J. Arlen writes of television, "I can't say I completely agree with people who think that when battle scenes are brought into the living room the hazards of war are necessarily made 'real' to the civilian audience...It seems to me that by the same process they are also made less 'real'...tamed, by the enveloping cozy alarums of the household".  The thought resonates spookily with Griska's installation, in the enveloping and cozy Lenfest Plaza.  I wonder if it will be left to the audience to embody this sense of irony.

       

Works Cited

Arlen, Michael J., "Living-Room War", New York: Viking Press, 1969, p. 8

Installation specifications and other relevant facts gathered from Joann Loviglio's coverage, at http://www.ydr.com/state/ci_19156554

"home" exhibition at PAFA: a review by Jenna Buckingham

Getting Home

Hacking into art criticism with a focus on PAFA’s newest contemporary exhibit entitled “here.”

In the spirit of artist and writer John Kelsey’s, “The Hack”, and of the show that is the catalyst for this essay, I am exploring the idea of home, from a subjective and sentimental viewpoint: my own broken sense of identity and belonging.

“here.” brings together artists from 5 different major regions, the Southwest, the Midwest, Texas, the mid-Atlantic and the Southeast. Each artist or collective explores their own regionalism and how it defines and nourishes their practice. In an increasingly globalized world, the show suggests, home, the place where one belongs, becomes more coveted than ever. I really enjoy the way that the artists bring a sense of warmth and play to their exhibits. They take advantage of the idea that their work is not judged based on the precedence set by New York “salon” as it were, but by the standards that they themselves create and define. The result for the viewer is feeling simultaneously alienated from and in kinship with their work. Each of the works represents the artist’s environment or regional culture in which the come from. Though I was not able to directly relate to much of the imagery, never-the-less it was presented in such a way to enable me to connect to the work in some ways. This is sometimes portrayed with the aesthetic harmony of the piece, as in Aaron Rothman’s digital paintings of desert vegetation and Scott Hocking’s gorgeous photographs of abandoned sites in Detroit. Sometimes there is a sense of nostalgia such as the Americana familiarity of Erika Nelson’s “World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things”, that is pervasive in the exhibit. The artists are able to observe and comment on their cultural surroundings while simultaneously participating and become shaped by their location.

My personal experience with location and home has indeed been tumultuous and I feel that the artists in the show were grappling with the idea of belonging and physical place. I felt a kinship with the journey of their works and felt, both culturally and personally oriented for a moment while I experienced the exhibit. I found that no matter where the artists were from, where they have been, how much or how widely they’ve traveled, they all felt home in the same way. All of us have to learn to carry our homes turtle-like on our backs, so that we can maintain footing while the ground moves beneath us.
I am “the perpetually unseen protagonist in my work.” This thought, presented by Abigail Anne Newbold in regards to her “Homemaker Series” was, in the interpretation of Roland Barthes, the punctum of the show for me. That is, a personal connection that transforms the whole relationship between the viewer and the work. Newbold’s installation consisted of a wall painted gray with several hooks and hanging apparatus supporting various outdoor survival provisions, both modern and primitive. All of the items were either found or made by the artist and color coordinated by looped string for packing into a knapsack which also hung empty on the wall. Larger supplies consisted of a hand-altered sleeping bag and a waterproof jumpsuit with the artist’s initials on it. In front of the wall was a nineteenth century wagon with high-tech waterproof fiber cover in place of canvas. Next to that is a modern, one-person synthetic waterproof tent and finally, a meticulously designed antique-style woodworking bench. She had made herself a survival kit.
She is the explorer and her wilderness is her life. She has laid out her provisions as in a well organized shed might be containing objects that seem to be made for a prolonged nomadic exploration. However, the fact that she was not performing – not there putting on the suit and cooking with the supplies and coming in and out of the wagon or the tent, gave me the impression that while these objects are organized on the wall, she is settling somewhere nearby in an established dwelling. I envision that when the exhibit comes down, she will take up these things again, putting them all into a knapsack, and pick up her wagon for a new destination. The care taken with her piece leads me to  believe that this character is happy in her existence. Each item has been exquisitely designed and purposefully placed. The aesthetic consistency of the items as a group serves to define a chosen place of belonging but there too is an aspect of sadness, that for me, is the main driving force for the work: Everything is made for only one person and her individual needs for survival through solitary travel. The work also reminds me of a commercial line of outdoor gear, designed to entice customers to buy into a lifestyle. It’s not just about sport or recreation, there’s a certain image to live up to. It seems like just another way to get ahead. One can surround themselves with the latest and greatest items in the market, but still end up in a one-person tent alone at night. I think of the ways that we isolate ourselves in this busy, crowded world. We build barriers surrounding us and set up defenses against the terrifying prospect of that relentless threat - other people.

“Homemaker Series” illustrates this estrangement beautifully. I imagine the explorer protagonist and I root for her in her plight, much the same as I am rooting for and encouraging myself through the challenges and hardships of life. I think that when we can recognize that we are all on the same journey, dealing with the same fears and challenges, no matter our individual experiences, this recognition brings us together. There are things in this world that are truly worth being frightened of and that we must wage war against. It is only in our isolation from each other that we are defenseless against these true monsters. 

Jenna Buckingham is a first year Masters of Fine Arts student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Around and Within: Installations by Kristin Kozlowski and Sandra Gonzalez

Masters candidates at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts are given the opportunity to utilize specially delegated studios as installation rooms.  This is an exciting part of the PAFA curriculum as it allows students a chance to explore wider physical and temporal issues in their work and engage their colleagues in a different sort of discourse.

Second year MFA Kristin Kozlowski and first year MFA Sandra Gonzalez are the latest in this installation schedule.  Drastically distinct from one another in their particular narratives and material insights, they do share a common thread of commentary on the architecture around human beings; Sandra's is invested in a metaphorical architecture of memory and psychological spaces, while Kristin's directly engages the physical structures of the labyrinth neighborhoods we inhabit. 

Sandra's space, which she titled "The Persistence of Memory" is driven most by her personal connection with family and home.  She lived in Tamaulipas, Mexico until she was 14, when her family moved to Texas.  The displacement of home, what was then versus what has become, resonates in the raw, fading imagery of self and family portraiture.  The active premise of her show, however, is that we are privileged only so much visual recollection.  We have to write it down in order to retain it. Or do we?  She encourages us to share a memory of our own on pieces of rice paper that she adhered to a pillar and which we may or may not fold up and put inside hollow clocks hung in the space.  Our secrets are out, and one labors a bit in choosing which memory is the most 'cherished'.  Intentionally or not, Sandra has created a latent tension in this opportunity; after all, she will conceivably read all these notes.  How will she deal with the aftermath of this?  How could our memories mean anything to her?  There is something poignant and defeating in the re-reading of an anonymously written memory, and I hope this is something she considers for future work.

Walking into her installation, I was struck by how sparse it was.  We have to ask how can one portray an essence of memory in a visual installation?  At a first glance, Sandra's fairly conventional use of the space as a 'gallery space' is uncluttered; it seems almost too easy to be in, contrary to the way memory is constantly changing, never stagnant, and impossible to pin down.  To title one's work after one of the most recognizable paintings in the world (Dali's) is a loaded decision, but Dali's goal in his was to discredit the conditions of reality and reassert the unlikely 'reality' of the dream.  Sandra's installation affirms reality more than anything: she invites our immediate participation by writing on the papers.  The hanging clocks in her room, if they are in reference to Dali, are reverential but are at risk of becoming too literal.  The clocks point to the passing of time and are humorous if we read them as a kind of signifier of time, but can this be communicated in other ways?


Sandra uses words and images equally to talk about memory in her piece.  In "Ways of Seeing", author John Berger wrote "we only see what we look at.  To look is an act of choice...what we see is brought within our reach".  If this is true, can we say the inverse:  What we do not see is constantly escaping our reach?  A truly convincing visual commentary on memory can use this condition effectively.  By its nature, memory is always evading us.  It is never brought within reach; yet almost everything in Sandra's installation is.  However, Sandra does make our being explicit, and this is another quality of memory, since memory is always bound to a subject.  It always converges back to the one with the memory.  By being asked to write our memories down we are subjected to her eye.


There is also the issue of the photographs themselves, and we cannot get past Sandra's images without conjuring Roland Barthes'  reflections on photography in his book "Camera Lucida", in which he writes that "the return of the dead" is inherent in every photograph.  Her focus on her grandmother is in line with this and there is an uncanny moment that occurs when one's eye goes from the commercially manufactured clocks in the room to the image of the clock in the photograph of her grandmother.

   

A sense of anonymity is at play in Kristin's installation as well.  There are no signs in the world she has created; there is no language at all.  It is almost as if the space she is presenting is some alternate pre-lingual dimension.  But, Slavoj Zizek says in his film "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema", "We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what we truly are."  This is helpful in illuminating how Kristin's exhibit, as a fiction, immediately makes us subjects in it.  One of the central twists is in the basic fact of its condition: we step from the city of Philadelphia into an art school and into the 'sanctuary' of an art studio, only to find ourselves back within that cumbersome urban network once more.  This is very keen, but the one disruption to this quality is in the way Kristin leaves the back end of the studio fairly empty and unlit; we are directed into the other half of the room where the action is.  We can always keep one foot in and one foot out.

I see parallels with Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, a work about the psychological gulfs resulting from living in a world of rooms: one space separated from another space.  This is a problem for us, which Kristin highlights by making her structures so distant and fragmentary.  Made almost entirely in black tape which Kristin transforms into a semi illusionistic depiction of buildings, highways, steps and windows, the urban space is devoid of any literal human qualities.  We are strangers within a cold, surgically descriptive place.

By using cut tape, Kristin has all but eliminated the signs of her hand.  The preciousness of the artist-hand is undone.  It is rather in the referencing of our being within this world that the work takes shape.  The fragility of the tape speaks to Kristin's thoughtfulness on the ever present risk of being in a place that might suddenly all collapse.  We live within and depend on the foresight of engineers, architects and construction workers and rarely question it: our being within a space is inevitably just so; her installation engages this.  She expresses joy in disorienting the viewer and getting lost herself, and responds to the abandoned, uglier faces of Philadelphia.  Ending my talk with her, she voiced a desire to bring something playful out of the darker problems inherent in many American cities.  I look forward to seeing her do this and hope she critically engages the many facets of her project.

IN THEORY  will be here for the next series of MFA installations.  Do not forget to send ideas for other postings.  We encourage your submissions!

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland, 'Camera Lucida', Hill and Wang, 1980

Berger, John, 'Ways of Seeing', Penguin, 1972

Zizek, Slavoj, 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema', Dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2006

Inspired Noun of the Day

And the Inspired Noun goes to...

But wait.  How does one go about making the first selection from a virtually infinite source of historic figures and their cultural residue?  Surely this is a doomed exercise, a blatant avowal of personal preference- a conspiracy at best!

From the cave paintings at Lascaux

I can hear all those groans of resignation.  Here is why: this is the earliest drawing known to mankind, approximated at 17,300 years old and discovered - get this - by four teenagers.  The most important drawing in the history of the earth found out by a squad of pubescent twerps and their dog.  And here we are slaving over theses in a cold white square room, and there you are reading about this.  Existential...I told you this was the most fitting starting point!

Without Lascaux we do not have Picasso, Michelangelo, Pollack, maps, sketchbooks, advertising, and the entire history of art.  The global tradition of drawing from observation has claimed the soul of many an artist; using the mark as a metaphor for a human being's place in the world has shaped the evolution of our species.  The story of all art, if there is one, is the obsession with interpreting what we see.  It is the repetitive exercise of memory, as seeing is a continuous act of memorizing.  It all started on these caves.