Khazar Danm 203 Exercise IILatest Version

So, I’m about the right distance here?

Do you want to just start? That sounds good. Yeah, that looks good on the levels

How do we start, then?

That’s fine

Well let’s see, I learned group work and cooperation. We founded a reading group in that that was really excellent and brought the cohort, I think, strongly together. Uh, which is… unique, (ha ha). Certainly from the first years now second years, I don’t think they had this kind of cohesion. And we were building it in the first quarter, but in the second quarter we really, yeah it was great, we really came together.

And it was enormously valuable. Elizabeth, or Beth Stevens, suggested it 

That we form a reading group because I was complaining that “I can’t read this much” (singsongy)

And it was a great idea.

So that was a real learning experience in that regard, I’d never done a reading group before, so that’s kind of a meta-lesson from the class that was valuable, I think as valuable as the class itself.

Uhm, the actual reading in that class that affected me uh, were uh, Nakamura, particularly. Sure, what is it, I forgot the name of the book… Cybercultures I think? Yeaaah, uh

Yes, Lisa Nakamura’s writings, yeah, great book, uhm she had the uh… I had … she brought up the basic point of what color are you, and such, in cyberspace. Yes, and a question that had never occurred to me before.

And a context, it was quite a… uhm…controversial topic in the, in the class. People were like strongly disagreeing that the idea about. I think most of them kind of came around to. I immediately struck on it as a valid concept, and an enlightening one to me.  I’d never positioned my head in that way before. 

Since I’m part of the dominate culture. Ha ha! These are good things to learn.  Very good things to learn.

Also got into that, and learning reading and writing and such. Got a lot deeper into Benjamin. As testified by that paper and that sculpture right there. And also re-read the Art… no the uh Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production, for the third time. More deeply than ever, and it’s an amazing thing to read, as you know, I’ve read it three times, as I’ve said, and each time I get(laughing) a totally different reading on it. I’ve never read anything like that before. Uh, I look forward to reading it again (laugh).

Probably every quarter perhaps here, and maybe every year of my life. I get something new out of it every time.

I also really got a lot out of Deleauze and Guattari’s concepts of rhizomes. The reading was really hard, really opaque. I had a friend who told me that she sat through a two hour lecture with Deleauze and didn’t understand a word he said.

It was two hours later and she had no idea what had just happened

Yeah!

Indeed.

Yeah, the deep reading as a method of research is new to me. I mean I’ve been a uh, kind of an autodidact. I’ve done most of my earning on my own. I’ve been out of college since the seventies. I’ve kept a strong intellectual pursuit in my life, but never that deeply. And being focused in that deep was was a great experience and one that I’ll continue.

And the rhizomatic concept was one that I’d been kicking around in my own head for a long time, and it was so eloquently put. And such great imagery. It’s a very visual image, obviously, and I think in visual images and when I can glom on to a concept that ’s , that I can get a mental picture of? It sticks. Sticks really well. And that is a very good one.

Uh, the other thing I got out of it,  uh, perhaps, well,  I prefaced the paper. The paper wasn’t quite my thesis, but a stab at the direction. And it also got me going in the direction. And I’ve in fact been coming up with what I think is a cohesive theme… for my thesis, which is, uh, Reliquaries.  

We’ll get into more about why that is later when we talk about some of the issues, concerns and focuses.

Yes. And give and example?

Uhhh, this strikes me as a very deep question, a real universal one and therefore difficult to give specific examples to? He he. Uh, yeah, really hard, in a sense the answers are the examples in themselves. There self explanatory I guess? But uhm 

Uh, that said, let’s see. Love. Specifically for my wife.

Fear of death. It’s a very real one. Fear of a life lived without reflection. And desire. Desire for knowledge, intellectual stimulation, self-reflection and dreaming.Because I do a lot of dreaming work. Yeah. That’s a short answer to that one, because you can either do it kind of that length, or you can, we can do the rest of the…

That’s what I’m trying to say

No

No, I think that when it comes to that motivation it’s quite a bit more specific. And does lend itself to examples. So um, is after years of commercial work, because that’s what I’ve done, uh, it’s time for me to do art. I’ve done for others, and now its time to do it for me. Uh, I’ve been too long with, uh, to long without it. And it’s been a depleting experience. I feel less than I should be. Or could be. Should is a bad word.

Uh, so, that motivates me. That, to fill the void that’s been there before. Uhm, I mean I did alright before, uh, got enough money, got enough attention. Art was too scary, it was too risky.

I believe there’s a prejudice. No, I know there’s a prejudice within the art community about giving it all up for your art, and I just couldn’t do that. And I’ve spent a lot of years trying to forgive myself for not giving it all up. Still not that, I’m still kind of not too sure about it, but what else is there? I don’t have any kids, no really compelling reasons to live but one and two above.

I shouldn’t have written that because I don’t’ remember what one and two is… Oh yeah, fear of death and desire (which is actually two and three. One and two is Love and Fear of death). Ha ha ha ha, good reasons. Uhh, and ehh,  suppose, number three, which is desire. It informs my motivations.

My Influences, uhhh, I think of that as being who, individuals, movements, areas of thought, those kind of things that are going to influence me, and I have a pretty good list, actually. Uh, I put it on my website, even.

So I don’t know that we need to go into the whole list, I’ll hit some highlights perhaps, but I would say about it that when I applied at at uh, uhm, CCA. And I, I didn’t make it the first year. The first year I applied, and I came and I talked to one of the people there about why. What could I do to improve my portfolio. And one of the criticisms I got was that my list of influences was… antiquated. That it didn’t seem very up to date. It seemed kind of old fashioned.

And I thought about that quite a bit. And I came back the next year and applied again – they didn’t let me in, again – but uh, I have no problem with that. I didn’t change a one, because, Christ, there my influences. You know, that … I’m not going to make stuff up, these are the things that have influenced me.

So I could say, like visual artists, ok.

Joseph Cornell, for his little enclosed worlds.

Bet Saar, for her little enclosed worlds. Or Bette Saar, sorry.

Uhm, uh, Marcel Duchamp, for his intellectual mind, especially for the Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even.

David Nash, a british sculptor, who  just love. He does stuff … where is a piece of his I saw recently… He… Oh, it’s at the De Young, he has a nice piece at the de Young. He takes wood in the forest and cuts it apart with a chain saw. And makes these tremendous sculptures. There often there.. There’s one marvelous one that’s just a cube made from a tree, of green wood, and as its dried its cracked and torqued and twisted. Just marvelous. He does things, though, like he’ll go out into the woods and camp near the tree before it’s cut down. He’ll only cut down trees that have been slated to be cut down because there diseased. He will cut the branches off the tree and make a fire of it and use the charcoal to make drawings of the piece he’s going to do. And that whole process to me, it’s a symbolic process, uh, almost a metaphysical one, is fascinating to me. It’s very influential to me so I think a lot in the terms that he’s led me to in any case.

Robert Hudson is a favorite. David Hockney. Chris Burden, uh, is a huge, I’m a huge fan of his, particularly for how he used to scare me. I was around in the 60’s when he was doing his early stuff. Getting shot in the arm and nailing himself to the top of a Volkswagen, and those things. I was frightened by it.

I’d never been frightened by art before, so I really appreciated that

And uh, relating some other stuff, there’s an artist, uh uh, named Michael Maier, from the 16th century, who did alchemical engravings

Whom I’m quite fond of, because I’m very interested in alchemical things. And possibly for different reasons than most people might be, but he’s the best.

And the Audible Arts, JS Bach, for his mathematics

The Second Viennese School, for their 12 tone principles.

Harry Partch, for casting off western tonality.

John Cage for his aleatoric compositions. For thinking those ways.

Stockhausen, for, uh, just everything, particularly Gesang de Jungling.

Frank Zappa, for his unrelenting experimentation and steadfast iconoclasm in the face of conformity.

Hehehe, and in fact a lot of my influences come from reading a great old Frank Zappa album that he just put his list of influences in. 

And I just pursued all of and I found Stockhausen for example

Oh really? How could they not know, he’s so great!?

Yeah. I’ve, I’ve never studied music. In fact I have no ability to play.  But I’m a, just a, It’s one of those autodidact things, I’ve been fascinated by it my whole live and delved into it. It, hmmm, well, it’s an influence, right?

Uhh, minimalists in general, Reich and Glass in particular.  Einstein on the Beach, especially.

Michael Nyman for making classing music even more exciting than it used to be. You know his work?

He did the scores to most of Peter Greenaway’s films.

Those amazing stomping, rhythmic, yeah. I have a big collection

In the literary arts I have three favorite authors.

Is this a good way for me to be going by the way? Should we continue at the details…are too long?

OK. Let’s do a quick wrap up…

OK, cool, yeah. I’ll just say John Barth.

Total top favorite. And Thomas Pynchon.

Ha ha ha! Oh cool! How about Milorad Pavic?

Ok, he did a book called Dictionary of the Khazars, 

It’s really good. It’s better than you might expect.

And we’ll skip the film stuff except maybe for Fritz Lang and Tex Avery and Buster Keaton. I can’t resist those, and the Lumiere Brothers. That’s pretty much them.

Uuuuhhhmm

Let’s get to the next one.  Yeah, because then I’ve got philosophy, science

Yes. Uhm, I think in order to do that I need to first define the aspects.

Which are, I suppose, are the themes I find running in and developing in my practice. And I would list those, if you could bullet point them, uh as

Dreams

Early Christianity,

Mythology

Alchemy

Symbolism

Geometry and Magic

And Secrecy, obscurity and obfuscation.

That is a kind of a set, and that’s where I dive into the personal. The other stuff is somewhat external, that part is extremely internal.

Also layering and transparency. And that one seems kind of outside of the others, but I don’t know, I can’t get rid of it. It’s there, it’s what, uh, it’s what visually really titillates me. Um now as for connections, they are all connected. Obviously.

Dreams are connected to everything. Uhm, since they reveal my unconscious’s or subconscious’s opinion on all those different aspects together.

Early Christianity is a form of Mythology, so that’s related to it. But is the form which happens to be influential in my life and my position in this time in western civilization.

Uhm, alchemy and so forth is a way of bringing all the parts together. Or at least a kind of structure to refer to in that bring of them together. It’s a structure, in other words, that I can look back upon and map into the other aspects. The other, what did we call them? aspects. Aspects. I used the right word.

Uhhhhh, secrecy etcetera is very personal and interior to all of my work. And layering and transparency seem to be transcendent way to express all of that. It’s one I can’t really articulate why, but it does. I’d be interested in being able to articulate why. That’s worth examining to me. 

(pause) It’s good. That was it.

Shorter and sweeter

Hmmm.

There’s a lot of relationships there. Oh yeah yeah yeah, Benjamin’s mysticism and my mysticism

Uhmm. He has such and interesting thing going on between this communist dialectic and this very political and intellectual kind of thing going on and then he talks about angels…

Facing backwards into the future. Coming up with these fabulous mystical images. He focuses on an automaton, a Turkish automaton with a chessboard playing dwarf inside of it, just wow, these remarkable things, and he’s pulling many different things together to come up with these almost…they, sometimes they seem non sequitur, and sometimes they aren’t. The certainly seem a kind of unconscious. 

Community, what is my definition. Here’s the first thing I wrote, and I crossed it all out. Because I really thought over my thinking of this, and I just came down to what I… I said well OK, just define it. And… to me community is a collection of individuals held together by some common relationship.

These relationships can be

Blood, as in family or ethnicity

Belief, as in religions, scholarship or politics

Occupation, as in work or hobby

Geography, as in neighborhood

And Geopolitical, as in citizen.

And there are, of course, crossovers and, you know, one community can have feet in several of these different areas. But, but that’s the way I see it. That’s the way it comes up in my mind.

So the next question, if I may, so how does my art practice situate me in relation to community thus defined? And I say here, that I express myself within the trappings and concepts in which I have been indoctrinated. And into reaction to that indoctrination. I accept that it’s indoctrination, however, it’s still there. Huh, I’m not going to through it off. It’s what’s made me, it’s what I am.

Uh, while I’m particularly interested in reshaping that indoctrination or that community I am aware, as I’ve said, of its influence. How, for example, could I be fascinated, as fascinated as I am by early Christian church except as a reaction to contemporary, we’ll call it “christ-ism.” As opposed to Christianity. I don’t think it’s… were not really looking at Christianity very often today. We’re looking at people that talk about Christ but don’t really understand it.

Uhmm, my world has been shaped by the communities I live within and my work is a reaction to world. That’s my kind of short answer.

I had a whole secondary answer, for this that I crossed out as well.

My reaction to the community

It can be

Second, dialectic. And dialectic can be oppositional, certainly. But, um, it’s more dialectic. I take it in, I deal with it, ehhh…I just informs, I mean it has to inform everything you do, there’s no way around it. Uh, but I don’t see my relationship to it as being… manipulative. As feeding back into it in an attempt to change it.

OK

I’ll just read it. “What do you or who do you consider your community?” And a very short answer to this may help.

Artist, as belief and occupation.

Scholars, belief and occupation.

Um, and then kind of stuff that doesn’t really affect my art all that much, but yeah, I’m part of that community, Alameda, that’s the city I live in when I’m not here. I’m a student here, that’s certainly a community. I’m citizen of California, a citizen of the united states. Citizen of the world. And I happen to live at 1723 8th Street. And the people and animals that live at my house.

Oh yeah, my cats. I’ve got three of them I couldn’t leave them out.

And is that the same as audience? … was the next question. And… a lot of thinking about this one.  But, no. I don’t think that is the same as audience.

My, as in something I possess, community as a personal relationship. The audience is not mine in that sense. They exist in a more exterior way. When I create a work and the community sees it, I assume at least that, and this is a big assumption, that the will on some level “get it.” That is, my community will get it. At least acknowledge that I have an art practice.

An audience, on the other hand, has no preconditions about what I do or what my practice is. This would be different if I were to incorporate audience into my practice, which I suppose I do in the simplest sense of getting the stand the right height and the lighting on it good so it can be seen, that kind of thing, but um, in the sense of the audience like and item of mass culture or entertainment, I’d like to avoid taking that into consideration when I make my work.

Yes

Me

Yes

In fact, I think it is, yeah.

It communicates to me, and it communicates to those members of my community I believe, but that’s where I’m differentiating an audience, This could be sets of things, certainly my community could be in the audience. But is that audience, en mas, a part of that dialog? Uhm, … no, I don’t see it that way.

Correct

Yeah, I did use the word “just” making it for me, that’s, that I didn’t answer it correctly in that case. Largely making it for me. It’s my primary concern, is, does it work for me. Uh, does it work for someone else, or even other members of my community, great if it does…

…That is difficult to answer. It does. There’s an is and there’s an isn’t. And there’s a happy, happier, less happy. Content, more content, less content – might be a better word. When I’m making a piece and I look at it and I think about it and I feel about it… What that criteria is, oh, it changes every time. You know. Generally I’ll be setting out with some idea, some goal that I want to reach, “this is it,” “have I reached the goal that I want to reach?” And the goal is different for every piece. 

Um hum. Yeah I could, but it would take me a little while to sit down and think about it. It’s a serious question. 

Where recording it here, so I’ll be sure to remember it. Your coming in on this, I’m sure.

We are very close, we’re very close.

Sorta close

Uh, you were just responding to my response to how it’s the same as audience and how do I identify with them, and I basically said see the above, that’s the same answer, and the next question see the above, how do you engage, that’s the second one

So we could skip to 11. “What is the relationship between research and your art practice?”… Tons. I have so much to research on alchemy, early church and so forth, I have plan to look deeply into angels and angelic mythology in fact over the summer…

…My work is strongly informed by research. It’s what makes the layers, meanings, symbolism possible. Uhm, once informed, I can then dig into my unconscious and creative force and extract the riches that come from all of that. They, they come together and in interesting ways and that’s that’s what the process of making it for me is, taking all these bits and pieces of research and ideas and… well, it’s just finding out stuff. That’s research. And they come together. That’s the fun. That would almost be a good way of talking about trajectory and goals. Fit that into that question pretty easily I think.

In terms of art or in terms of the content I’m…

Yes

Yes. Exactly so.

Next is “How does your work operate in the social realm?” My answer is “is this a trick question?” I’m not sure that I intend it to, but obviously it does. This speaks to the role of the artist in society and while I don’t find that in my practice I’m interested in directly affecting society, I am aware that my work and the work of any artist does have an affect. Which begs the question “and so what is the role of an artist in society?”

And to that, the shortest little answer, and good now that it is short, but it’s to react with and to culture, to interpret it, to reflect it back to the community.

But there could be another hour in that one.

How do I identify? Good one. Uh, straight white male – sounds like a personal ad – and adopted. I’m adopted and that makes a real difference in how I see the world and everything in it.

SELF-CENSORED

It was revelatory, to say the least. 

And how do you identify in relation to your art practice? Really not sure what that means. I thought about it quite a bit and I just couldn’t quite…well my adoption issues come up a lot. And in fact, all this…probably influence everything. But I would say that, how do I put it here, they are…uhm… I suppose a lot of my practice is influenced by my adopted status, but hardly defined by it. So it’s an influence as opposed to a definition.  

Uhm…and then…What is your sound byte:

James Khazar is an artist whose practice is grounded in a lexicon of symbols from mythology, the collective unconscious, alchemical imagery and internal examination. His work, while exploring the intersection between digital techniques and analog artistic forms, is not about digital media per se, but uses whatever techniques are appropriate to expressing layered multivalent concepts of western culture, early christianity, and personal vision.

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