Christmas Lights

Home made card. The spirit of 2009 is for a return to our artistic culture. Speaking for ourselves. Listening to others. Not 'popular'. Just personal taste for sharing with others.

10.00 am. Today it is very cold and frosty and the fog is lying around the edge of the village. I am looking out from the height of my front study, pushing my legs against the radiator for warmth and checking that the cars are running safely on the icy lane out of the village. No one is outside all wrapped up in cheery scarves and gloves at the bus stop across the road. It is so cold that even the most doughty grandma and child is waiting for the possibility of some warm sun before heading to the village shop. Sun will not come. The forecast is for snow, if not today, then for sure tomorrow. So the accountant and I have just put the wire of plain clear twinkly lights out of a house window and on to the shrub border that lies alongside the path to the front door. We are subdued in our taste. However, our neighbour spouts a different combination of coloured flash – this year he has outlined the roof line of his car shelter roof in reds and greens. We had to be bullied into doing this a few years ago by our younger daughter. She of Mother Christmas tendencies, and themed party giving from an early age. But it is welcoming to have the lights at Christmas. And kind. It looks particularly special in the snow, like little stars in a white blanket of cloud. I look forward to the effect tomorrow.

Professor James R Flynn

Otago University Library - as it is now, but the tables are from the original building. I could comment further, but I think I have left enough clues today.

I was taught political philosphy by Jim Flynn at Otago university in the late 1970s, when he was first researching and writing about Race and IQ. He is Chicago trained, one of the brightest people I know, and went on the Freedom Rides down in the American South in the 1960s. It is easy to guess why he was hiding out in a New Zealand University - and has remained there, and he is not the only one from the Cold War period.

Flynn taught our Honours class to do statistical analysis, which as Political Studies students in the days when real money was still spent on large scale social science research about voters actions, was a skill we were thought to require. As we were mostly word orientated arty types, maths scared us, and he was incredibly patient, so the Standard Deviations have never scared me since. His first year Political Philosophy class in contrast, was a baptism of reading the original philosphical writers from Aristotle to R M Hare, and writing essays every week, marked by a post-graduate tutor. I loved it, and carried on, most of the 300 strong class did not survive. Flynn was recently on Channel 4 in a series about race and discrimination talking about just how far the research which he was starting then has gone to counter the crazy racial prejudices of the inherently selfish. The idea that discussing ethical issues as the 'ideal' or the 'object', rather than theoretical metaphysics of logic, was his cue to training us to 'check the evidence' as the correct basis for any political stance. It is good to remember that Marx was an economist as well as a social theorist, turning over huge books of collected figures in the British Library.

Correct attitudes in statistical interpretation has been brought out by the latest Climate change and academic science brouha. I was a young political ecologist activist as well in those days. I have no doubt that the figures are hardly conclusive, but it is important that they are kept - even if it is 200 years before any sense is made of them. The problem is always what I like to call the Doomsday scenarios. From religion to insurance salesmen - lets have a single 'bogey man' tactic. Rising sea levels is a strong image. Pollution on its own is bad enough. But in an age when hours in the British Library is not the only way to share information, academics can't cower in their institutional isolation any more than the politicians can. If you have to defend your work to the educated masses as well as the intimates of the learned cloisters, that is as it should be, even from the University of East Anglia.

Flynn is a Distinguised Associate of the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University, where he is described as a psychologist. His son Victor is a professor of Mathematics at Oxford, and did his PHD at Cambridge, after an undergraduate degree at Otago.

Brazilan Art and film - Helio Oiticica

My own picture of the police at the G8 protest, London, April 2009. The shock of the middle classes when the police fail to show respect. I had to use all my 'schoolmarm' powers on a police officer to escape the 'kettle tactics'. The orders were clearly based on a fear of a much more aggressive demonstration than was actually happening.

Event this week.

Dr Karl Posso
Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American StudiesUniversity of Manchester

Suspended Animation: Affect and Affection in Tropicalist Brazil

This paper will examine the central function of the affective image and object in a
selection of works by ‘Cinema Novo’ filmmaker Glauber Rocha (1939-1981) and the
neo-concrete artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) produced during Brazil’s ‘Tropicalist’
period of cultural experimentation in the late 1960s. The concern with social and
political issues at the time of the military dictatorship led Rocha and Oiticica to
attempt to displace conventional knowledge and recognition in order to develop
artistic modes for intervening ethically in the world. Affection in their work becomes
less a question of what is represented – transcendent ideals – and more a case of
violent sensation, a means of interrupting action-reaction circuits: this shift towards
the affective suspension of representation, and of judgement, in/by their work, I
argue, functions as a timely event of ethical intensity.

A paper to be given on Thursday at Cambridge University, and which I would like to hear…

But I have 2 preliminary thoughts. One is that this particular combination of filmmaker and artist was featured at the Tate Modern in 2007, and one of my concerns then about the published work on Oiticica in particular was the arguement that as an artist he was a 'universalised' creative, and not influenced directly by thinking about the poverty problems around him until later in his career. He was not the only Brazilian in the late 1950s to change direction on this - and most important was the art critic, Ferreira Gullar, who had promoted Oiticica, but who became a poet, and went off to Recife to participate in Street Theatre and other direct action cultural work. But there was a French PHD student in Art History from Manchester University speaking at the Tate Modern seminar, who I hope has learned more about the sitituation in Brazil since then. Manchester has some good Brazilian academics in post. Oiticica's work is placed in the care of Texas University, which also has other Brazilian artists work. I am not sure it serves them well if it excludes the environment in which the work was created. Brazil needs this material in its own institutions.

The second point is that I feel by working from the artistic work, to the restrictive event (the didatura) to the change in focus as 'ethical' it ignores signs in the artistic production prior to 1964 - and Glauber Rocha was radical from the begining. My own work with the artistic influences on Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, who was critically interpreted as following an intellectual art appreciation of Miro - image - poem, rather than thinking what images and politics did Cabral instinctively use as a man from Recife, and place in his work. The phrase 'misleading ideas' is much more subtle when, even more than 'tropicalia', the idea of hiding radical truths about Brazilian society in learned cultural discourse of internationalised art is engaged. Of course Cabral had to be 'politically protected' in the Diplomatic Service. The colour idea is key - has Posso picked up on that I wonder. Well I don't mind if my own ideas turn out to be the same as everyone else. I am sure that as a professor, Karl will be much better able to express himself than I can.

I had another quotation that I have been keeping in reserve in thinking about aesthetics of poverty.


"..only what is repressed is symbolised; only what is repressed needs to be symbolised" .


This is apparently from Ernest Jones (1916) who was a contemporary of Freud in Vienna - I don't know the original source, this is in Freud for beginners (1979) p 173. I expect it relates to dreams, not politics.

One last Brazilian puzzle for today. The significance of the 'yellow mercedes' in Clarice Lispector's The hour of the star. Discuss in relation to the 'yellow mercedes' in Amarelo Mango.