Anagram

Some Possible Anagrams for my name, Robert J Whitney:

By Whiner Jotter
Be Her Wintry Jot
Brother Tiny J. We
Rob When Jittery
Brother Jet Winy
Brethren Wit Joy
Trite John Be Wry
Byte Writer John
Better John Wiry

Spot, Pilot!

beat.{ effectively suspending the relevance of the moment: we are born with every heart beat. "what are you doing here?" depends on your notions of incarnation, while "all these years" result in a context no more relevant than gallons of blood. this abstract rhetoric will never amount; while the subsequent birth of every step and the image of something vested i will never understand, and can not shake for the death of me, is also born in every beat. } beat.

Wholphin

For those who don't know, Wholphin is a new project by McSweeny's
which features great, often hilarious film. Like McSweeny's, the films are all shorts, and the work is well edited so that the selection presented for viewing on-line often carries a style that will appeal to most fans of the McSweeny's vein of satire and wit.

Wholphin is a new quarterly DVD magazine from McSweeney's, lovingly encoded with unique and ponderable films designed to make you feel the way we felt when we learned that dolphins and whales sometimes, you know, do it.
[WholphinDvd.com]

The greatest part about the website is of course the fact that you can "watch stuff" via streamed video. The saddest part is that you can't embedd it. To take it home, order it on the website or in select stores (I found it at my local campus bookstore, actually) available for subscription ($50 for 4 issues, 1yr), but even just visitng the website is well worth having a peek what some really smart, creative, and hilarious people have been up to.

What's the deal with that name you ask? The website has this to say:

A NOTE ON THE TITLE:

What, you may ask, is a Wholphin?! Photographic evidence can be found languishing in the nooks and crannies of the internet, but those too busy to visit Google for the 28th time today can trust us that it's the lovechild of a bottlenose dolphin and a false killer whale. A beautiful hybrid born of invention and exploration.

God bless you Dave Eggers.

Roman Signer

"Signer’s 'action sculptures' involve setting up, carrying out, and recording 'experiments' or events that bear aesthetic results. Following carefully planned and strictly executed and documented procedures, the artist enacts and records such acts as explosions, collisions, and the projection of objects through space. Video works like Stiefel mit Rakete (Boot with Rocket) are integral to Signer’s performances, capturing the original setup of materials that self-destruct in the process of creating an emotionally and visually compelling event. Signer gives a humorous twist to the concept of cause and effect and to the traditional scientific method of experimentation and discovery, taking on the self-evidence of scientific logic as an artistic challenge."
(cmoa.org)

David Foster Wallace

There are many reasons why you should check out the work
of David Foster Wallace, but suffice it to say that he is
arguably one of the best writers working today.

His bibliography is vast, he has done work for many
magazines (Harpers, Esquire, etc.),written a number of
prolific books, and can be found quietly featured all over
the web.  Paste Magazine said of his most recent book:

"David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster is a big, irresistible shaggy dog of a book—muddy-pawed, it never stops barking, but it’s abounding with enthusiasm and love. And just when you think it’s more trouble than it’s worth, it surprises you with a noble act or tender gesture."

Also quite recently, Mr Wallace was selected as editor of The Best American Essays, and his amazing introductory piece "Deciderization 2007" really reveals so much about culture, self, and the process of editing. I couldn't recommend it more.

-----------------------

Excerpt:

Part of our emergency is that it's so tempting to do this sort
of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed
positions, rigid filters, the 'moral clarity' of the immature.
The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy
amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it's
continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance
and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and
literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to
need help. That's about as clearly as I can put it. I'm aware
that some of the collection's writers could spell all this out
better and in much less space. At any rate, the service part
of what I mean by 'value' refers to all this stuff, and extends
as well to essays that have nothing to do with politics or
wedge issues. Many are valuable simply as exhibits of what
a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular fact sets
'whether these involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids'
cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs,
the near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake,
the existential synecdoche of stage fright, or the revelation that
most of what you've believed and revered turns out to be
self- indulgent crap.


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I Will Not Make Anymore Boring Art

29 seconds of
I Am Making Art by John Baldessari
(1971)



From vdb.org:
"A good example of Baldessari's deadpan irreverence is the 1971 black-and-white videotape entitled I Am Making Art, in which he moves different parts of his body slightly while saying, after each move, 'I am making art.' The statement, he says, 'hovers between assertion and belief.' On one level, the piece spoofs the work of artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, explored the use of their own bodies and gestures as an art medium. The endless repetition, awkwardness of the movements made by the artist, and the reiteration of the statement 'I am making art,' create a synthesis of gestural and linguistic modes which is both innovative (in the same way that the more serious work of his peers is innovative) and absurdly self-evident."
—Marcia Tucker, "John Baldessari: Pursuing the Unpredictable," John Baldessari (New York: New Museum, 1981)

28 seconds of
I Will Not Make Anymore Boring Art by John Baldessari
(1971)



From vdb.org:
'I will not make any more boring art,' John Baldessari wrote over and over again in a work done in 1971. The impulse for the piece, he says, came from dissatisfaction with the 'fallout of minimalism,' but its implications are far greater. It is typical of Baldessari's work, for not only is it extremely funny, but it is also a strategy, a set of conditions, a directive, a paradoxical statement, and a commentary on the art world with which it is involved. Like all his work to date, it addresses, on many complex levels, issues about art, language, games and the world at large."
—Marcia Tucker, "John Baldessari: Pursuing the Unpredictable," John Baldessari (New York: New Museum, 1981)


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Beginnings

"The irritation of doubt causes a
struggle to attain a state of belief"
- C.S. Pierce

This is a way of establishing a history- no a mythology. A mythology that dehistoricizes.

What is history? Even that which we experience, we are forced to view through context. We must, in some manner, interpret the world in order to move through it physically and metaphysically. Context is the place from which this understanding is created, but context is a fluid thing. Redraw a memory, and you will find it continually existing through a new context, and a new conscious self. Furthermore, where is context created? From where do we draw our understanding of this notion? Is it, in part, an arbitrary thing?

We build histories for everything we encounter, not in the active linear sense necessarily, more often passively, through our minds pre-occupation with understanding, with believing. The mind has great need to make sense of the world, to believe in, to organize it, and so we impose structure on that which has no need and no wish to be structured. To constantly be awake to all things would render us useless; frozen; dead. We have need for forgetfulness, so we create memory that we may set things aside.

"...creating one path into the infinitely manifold path necessarily eradicates all other possible paths. In this way, remembering is also a creative forgetfulness, a necessary fiction that allows a person to carry on."
(Marks, Art Journal Summer 2007, 22)

What I am getting at is that we don't know, don't try to know, and actually are incapable of conceptualizing the histories of countries, people, or anything really. There is no history, only events viewed through context. Whether this context is drawn from an attempt at understanding or not is, at best, self-referential. We create these mythologies for that which we consider other (that from which our mind has not found rest). The ability of anything to forge its own identity is inconsequential, because we necessarily supplant these other identities with an image built on the abstract notions of rhetoric. In this way, our notions of memory, our histories, our beliefs are, for all intensive purposes, arbitrary assertions that create a fiction. Things that we replay for ourselves whenever nessicary, whenever belief meets doubt. There can be no difference between myth and memory, and no linear progression which is not an imposition.

Beginnings:
This is an attempt at creating a fiction and a myth. This is memory. This is willful forgetfulness. This is a history with no real purpose. This is empty rhetoric. This is exercise. We harmless pine, pine to believe so we may stop believing- and meanwhile, press on.

This is a proposition.