LearningQuest Manifesto: Mark I

Now, as many of you know, Old Ken has recently received a promotion and has now become Dean of The School of Serious Studies. As befits such an occasion, I was asked to make a few remarks on the work with which the name of Ken Digby has become most widely known. Of course, I can mean none other than that frequently misunderstood project called “LearningQuest.” Since its delivery just over a week ago, I have heard from a few colleagues that there might some broader interest in this speech. Thus, I have posted my address, with a few minor emendations, below. As to these editorial interventions, Old Ken should remark that I found some of my more pithy extemporaneous quips to fall a bit flat in the chilled aspic of written prose. Therefore, where appropriate I have sought to sublimate this turgid matter in my customary percolating alembic of images—an approach I trust you will not find entirely disagreeable. Without further ado, then, I offer my speech more or less as it was presented this past Saturday evening before an august assembly at The School of Serious Studies:

“Esteemed colleagues, friends, President Butter and the now-retired Dean Martin—it is a pleasure and a privilege to see you all here tonight, to accept the great honor and responsibility of the deanship of The School of Serious Studies.

“With the gravity attendant upon such a position, I feel it is only right that I try to share with you the work that occupied my time explicitly for the last five years and, more generally, for the bulk of my adult life. This work, as many of you know, has come to be called ‘LearningQuest’—a title at which I have at times balked but one with which I feel like I have come to cordial understanding. As such, I offer to you tonight an overview of this controversial and much-disputed project in a talk that I’d like to call ‘ “LearningQuest”: What it is and What it is Not.’



“But, as any telling is better if prefixed with a bit of showing, I’d like to ask you to direct you eyes forward, toward the screen above my head where you’ll see a projected photograph I took recently at Avebury. A sheep grazes in the foreground on a verdant blanket, from which rise the massive monoliths installed in the chalky ground thousands of years ago. Although the quality of our photograph is not terrific, signs of more recent human presence are certainly perceptible within it—namely, in the shallow, scooped pathway of yellowed grass which cuts diagonally upward across the picture-plane from the image's lower right hand corner. Whether we might want to imagine this as an Iron Age rill, trod by the rough clogs of our ancient forebears, this path has certainly been traced and retraced by legions of modern-day camera-toting tourists, much like the ivory-clad gent who appears here near the left-hand horizon.



"Yet, as I made my tourist rounds at this fascinating site, I felt myself becoming increasingly cognizant of how we might think of Avebury being experience by its more permanent inhabitants—sheep. Consider here the massive, arrowhead-shaped monolith depicted above and especially the curious dirt path, which encircles its base. What might have made this path? At first, Old Ken envisioned that this path might have been worn down by human feet—hiking boots, 'wellies,' and the like, much as we saw jaundicing the grass in the image above. But, if we consider that the vertical height of the monolith's most extreme projection at right is little more than four feet off the ground, it becomes hard to imagine how human feet could have worn the earth in such a manner. Are we to believe that crowds of tourists have felt compelled to duck down, performing a kind of limbo dance, to make a circular way around these standing stones?



"Upon this exposed earth, we might find some evidence to corroborate our suspicions. As the photograph above suggests, the ring paths around the monoliths are clotted with tufts of wool and sheep droppings.

"Further, as the image below may (faintly) hint, the bases of many of these stones appear slightly russet—as if burnished or given a patina by years (if not centuries) of physical contact. Thus, the more Old Ken looked at the Avebury stones, the more it felt like a human site that had been co-opted or reclaimed by sheep.



"Now, earlier generations found a melancholy beauty in those locations where Nature overtook human works—where ruins of ancient monasteries had been engulfed in weeds or a proud forest had grown up from within the crumbling walls of an abandoned castle. In our own day, we seem fascinated by the ways in which man-made spaces get reclaimed by subsequent generations, disassembled and made into new things. But what of the use of what seem to us as great monuments of human achievement by our animal brethren? Certainly, we are all familiar with the unfortunate ways in which public places—Trafalgar Square in London or the Piazza San Marco in Venice—have been colonized by pigeons, or the cases where outdoor bronze statues have been transformed into polychromatic works by the loose bowls of seagulls. Old Ken would almost want to describe such cases as something like ‘natural vandalism.’ Yet, with the case of the sheep at Avebury, it seems like we are witness to an occasion where animals have not only performed a utilitarian function (presumably, that is, they are scratching themselves and dislodging loose or tangled wool), while making subtle transformations of the human built environment (the burnishing of the stones and the baring of the earth).

“On the one hand, ideas of ‘natural vandalism’ or the ‘visual production of sheep’ might seem a bit silly. Surely, it might be argued, we misunderstand the meaning of the concepts of vandalism or production if we allow beings like sheep to partake of it. And do we not risk a kind of category mistake if we allow sheep or other animals the capacity to produce not only traces on the landscape but to make semiotically-invested marks? Though we no doubt risk sounding a ridiculous, the question of the animal interface with the human built environment is certainly an intriguing one—a question that might not only speak to environmentalists and anthropologists, but art historians, veterinarians, and conservation experts. Curious, playful, open-ended and potentially ridiculous: this is the pathway and the character of the approach I want to discuss with you tonight—an approach we know as LearningQuest.

“Quest—the word conjures notions of the adventurous and the mythic, from the quest for the Holy Grail of medieval European legend to Native American traditions of the ‘vision quest,’ wherein a seeker undergoes a ritualized ordeal in search for spiritual or other direction. Heterogeneous as these quests are, I want to suggest, they share a sense of the quest as being for something, as having a purpose or, more explicitly, an object (being it a grail or a vision).

“Along such lines, one might reasonably suppose that LearningQuest designates a quest whose purpose or object is learning. Yet, if we consult the Oxford English Dictionary, we find that our word ‘quest’ derives from the Latin verb ‘quærre,’ meaning to seek, to inquire, and to question. I want to offer to you tonight that, in its most fundamental gesture, what LearningQuest attempts to do is to reconceptualize our familiar, heroic notions of the quest for learning as the seeking of objects of knowledge. Instead it endeavors to recover a primordial, questioning comportment to the world—a comportment which is both essential to learning, but itself has to be learned and re-learned.

“In this way, it is perhaps useful to think of LearningQuest as a way of being-in-the-world. And here, I will make no secret of my indebtedness to the work of Martin Heidegger, an important figure in my youthful reading. No doubt, the vestiges (if not large portions) of Heidegger’s thinking might be said to inflect what I have to say to you tonight. But, taking up his terms for a moment, Heidegger (especially in the key works of the late 1920s) describes the human as a being thrown or projected into existence—a fallen creature to be sure, yet one that is always embodied and among other bodies in the world. Various factors—ranging from the concerted efforts of modern architecture or science and technology to the seemingly more innocuous gossip and idle talk found in everyday life (what Heidegger calls ‘the they’)—have the effect of flattening out our relations to this environing world. As Heidegger suggests, these forces hollow out the richness and diversity of the beings surrounding us until it appears that they simply stand opposite to or over and against us. Rather than enjoying their fullness and particularity, in other words, beings are so flattened and reduced in our everyday existence that they as so many objects.

“As suggested above, LearningQuest is a way of being-in-the-world; that is, it provides us with means through which we can step back from the flattening of the world into graspable and useful objects, so as to find a playful and experimental way toward things, which may then appear to us in their fullness and joyous plenitude. Now, perhaps joy, play and even the controversial doctrine of pointlessness seem far away from the traditions and values of The School of Serious Studies. Yet, as I hope to briefly elucidate, such approaches and their attendant values are not only fundamental to our ability to study seriously, but—in so doing—create space for the kinds of critical reflection so deeply needed in our dark, violent times.

“Nice as all this sounds, Old Ken hears you asking: what is LearningQuest? Although incidentally a great way to think about the artistic capacities of sheep, LearningQuest goes much deeper; the most satisfying answer I can offer you is that LearningQuest is the strongest adversary we have to fear. It seems hard to overstate the significance of the coercive force of fear in organizing the geo-political map, in shaping the everyday lives of the world’s populations, and molding the very lineaments of our imaginations. But, whether these fears are global or utterly personal or local, LearningQuest seeks to identify from whence these anxieties spring and thereby provide us with means to think ourselves out of them. Rather than fearing (and, subsequently, hating) people we think may hurt us, for example, we can learn about them and realize that our own interests are much closer to theirs than to those of our supposed leaders, who encouraged our animosity. Rather than resenting a professional acquaintance who we fear may receive a promotion or honor ahead of us, we can learn from and with them. Thereby, not only do we develop skills recognized within our professions; but we also gain critical insight into the imbecilic and fear-based mechanisms used within those professions to enact discipline and constraint thought. LearningQuest shows us the boxes in which we have entrapped ourselves and the doorways out; it allows us to understand our fears and can thereby free us from them.

“These reflections lead us naturally enough to the vexed question of LearningQuest and money—and to the familiar charge that you can’t make a career from a life committed to LearningQuest. Indeed, although serious work is certainly done within the confines of careers or the professionalized academy, careerism often appears at loggerheads with the basic impulse of LearningQuest, which is rooted in the Socratic admission of knowing nothing but always seeking to question what might be known. For, as you will know only too well, many constructs of the contemporary academy—wherein the conduct of one’s work is contingent upon the preliminary formulation of a research plan and funding applications that are then to be (more or less) corroborated by the actual research; where admiration still accrues to scholars who produce a ‘systematic’ body of work, which exposits a coherent point of view across a range of topics of problems—encourage the ‘branding’ of scholarship, often to the point of self-parody.

“While taking nothing away from those who choose to work in this way, those of us committed to LearningQuest are compelled by the need to keep themselves open not only to the world in a broad sense but, necessarily, the possibility that we may be wrong in our understandings of it. Thus, just as its name doubles as a satire of corporate branding jargon, LearningQuest must remain vigilant to the lures of intellectual systematization, coherent professional identity, and ultimately the desire for a career as conventionally conceived. The question, I would submit to you, is not how to make a career, but how to live—a question that should and must bring us to think of the academy (or any career) in more porous, flexible terms—as resources to be moved into and out of, and not holding sole imprimatur over meaning or value. We need to free ourselves from the fear that our path may lead to the poor house, and instead be open to devising an ongoing series of creative solutions to the questions (personal, intellectual, financial and otherwise) that arise in and are required to sustain the project of living.

“Above, I suggested that LearningQuest itself is something that has to be learned and re-learned. Indeed, all of our research indicates that this is true; practitioners report constantly having to recalibrate and reassess their LearningQuest pathways as demands of life change. No one is saying this is easy. But, through these turbulent passages, I want to suggest that certain LearningQuest values remain constant: openness; experimentation; playfulness; and taking risks. And if we had to come up with a motto or slogan (as we have often been asked to do) with which to summarize the general ethos of LearningQuest, I think we could do little better than with a phrase at once connected to the regenerative and therefore divine and with the fallen language of the human condition: ‘Fuck it!’ Now, this is not to be taken as a nihilist’s or a slacker’s reply, thereby implying that decisions should be made rashly without concern for their consequences. Far from it. Rather, I would suggest that we read this ‘Fuck it!’ as an affirmative utterance—a recognition that the world is neither so small that all choices can be reduced to a strategic calculation of cost and benefit nor so big that our actions make no registration at all. Instead, LearningQuest clings to a belief that fallen and misguided though our actions may be, they can be redeemed within the ongoing unfolding of LearningQuest itself. Thus, crucially, for an action or idea to be redeemed, it must first be enacted. Knowing requires doing, even though doing will inevitably be done imperfectly. Hence, ‘Fuck it!’

“Therefore, I say to you all assembled here within this glorious hall of The School for Serious Studies: LearningQuest is no easy road, nor is it the only road, nor is it the road that can or should be traveled by all. But, for those who are inclined to take the long way, to take chances, to do things just for the hell of it, to experiment for its own sake, to be playful—I say to you: please join me in smiling at the world around you and, in deep reverence, repeat our solemnly ridiculous motto: ‘Fuck it!’ Thank you.”

Art is Everywhere

It might seem like Old Ken has been offering a lot of posts about art recently. But this is not quite a fair presentation of the case. For art, that old strumpet, has simply been offering herself to yours truly with something like indecorous abandon. So, I'm going to keep my yappin' pretty short and sweet here, just so we can have a little glimpse of the amazing art to be found on the streets of London-town.



The gentleman you see represented in the two photographs above is one the O.K. has dubbed the "Yellow Man." As you will perhaps recall from the post about May Day festivities at Oxford, the "Green Man" is something of an important character in English vernacular folk culture—a symbol of fertility and rebirth. Our Yellow Man (as seen above in profile, with beady eye and darkened moustache turned toward our right) seems to derive from a less well known tradition. Composed in the present instance from what appears to be a clever concoction of construction site materials—some sort of light, congealed glue imbedded with rocks, glass fragments and vegetal matter—he must certainly be a golden god of summer. As he was recently discovered, might he be the patron saint of the summer solstice? I leave this to your erudite judgment.



From things golden and erudite, I'm afraid we next need to move on to something a bit more blue (in all senses of the term). As it was included within a collection of works on paper Old Ken found on the streets of South London (an absolute treasure trove of art, as suggested in the examples below), I feel required to share it. But, as astutely observed by a colleague, is she supposed to be wearing ice skates?



Another artful delight found in the pile described above. The most complimentary remark I can offer for this curiosity is the interesting use of black paper, which gives the whole affair a bit of a painting-on-velvet feel. If only we were so lucky!



Judging from the distortion perceptible in the representation of the model's face and the evident pleasure taken in such a cavernous presentation of her cleavage, Old Ken would have thought that the artist here might have been male. Therefore, it was some surprise to see the name "Alison" creeping up the righthand vertical border of the page. Have we just learned more about the predilections of Alison, or the biases of Old Ken? How, how!



Finally, it seems best to conclude with what might well be a self-portrait. The flattening of the facial features, which suggests work from a mirror, combined with the decorative, rather perfunctory treatment of the background suggest to Old Ken that someone (Alison again?) was perhaps completing her self-portrait requirements for art class. Well, she gets an A+ from yours truly.

London Art Attack

Perhaps it is the onset of vernal weather I have been telling you about recently, but art is busting out all over London-town. Now, Old Ken has basically panned the "Colour After Klein", but the Rebecca Horn "Bodylandscapes" (currently at the Hayward Gallery ) is but one of several really interesting shows on at the moment. Now, to give you a fair shake at these shows, we are going to have to rely on some different kinds of evidence. First, we have photos of Old Ken's crappy drawings of art; secondly, we have a rubbish photos of press-release material from a show; and then we have photos of art in the flesh!



So, to leap right into this bustle, let's take a little glance at a few sketches the O.K. made while visiting the Rebecca Horn exhibition. Who, the general reader might ask, is Rebecca Horn? Well, so far as Old Ken knows, she is a German-born artist, who worked in New York in the 1970s-80s and alternates between performance-related pieces and really curious things with mechanics. As my drawings will suggest, I was most intrigued by the works that fused these two interests together, making mechanical performances—often simulations of artistic processes. Indeed, the role of drawing in Horn's work has been billed as the central theme of the show—a motif illustrated by still photographs of an early performance by Horn. Therein, she fabricated a mask studded with short pencils and rotated her head against a canvas so as to trace the lateral her movements of her body. If interest in automatism of mark-making materialized in this early performance a costume that looks like it might well have inspired the startling get-up worn by Pin Head in the classic horror film "Hell Raiser," machines take a much greater role in some of Horn's later work. There, spider-like mechanical arms with butcher knife attachments flail around as if looking for an invisible roast; gigantic, mechanized styluses trace patterns in the ashes of books scattered on mirrors; or (as suggested in the second drawing above) a mechanized arm regularly triggers the production of ripples in a small pool on a gallery floor, thereby yielding incredible patterns of light reflection on an adjacent, darkened wall. Combine eerie with bitey and I think you'd have the sense; but not literally as you might then get "beery", which would miss the point a bit.



From all this dark and mechanical bliss, we move on to a very different kind of show currently available at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art). Old Ken likes this one a whole lot; not only is it free, but it's a yard sale! The premise, so far as it can be understood by yours truly, is that the main exhibition space is emptied out and the standard infrastructure and goods of the yard sale/flea market/car boot sale are moved in. Thus, rickety shelves filled with copies of completely random items (including a German picture book about Alf), card tables loaded with pure ceramic ambrosia, and racks and racks of second-hand clothes, which are restocked on a daily basis. Parenthetically, and without actual parentheses, I will note my horror at the presence and subsequent disappearance of a heavily used (that is, ripped and decomposing) rhinestone-studded G-strap from the racks; might we hope it was deemed simply too unethical to sell?

In any event, the "critique" here is only as much as the visitor wants to make it, so it seems to Old Ken: on the one hand, there is a television monitor on display at one corner of the gallery wherein we see grainy, security-camera-quality footage of people milling through a rummage sale. Over this video loop, we hear a voice (presumably of the artist) musing about commodity culture. Yet, this explicit "artist's intervention" is also kept sufficiently muted so that it doesn't get in the way of what seems to be the primary interest of most visitors: shopping. Old Ken has thought that, among other things, this sense of going to a museum and rifling through to find things to buy might well have an instructive relation to the way the ultra-rich look at and use museums. But, at the same time, I certainly haven't missed the chance for some bargains.



Indeed, a prize purchase has been this charming shirt. Is maroon Old Ken's color? Are the arms a bit, say, short?



Well, what do you want for the insanely low price of one pound in London?



In any case, now that we have seen photos of drawings and posters of art, it seems logical that we might say we have seen photos of art itself. For, one would think that if you go to a gallery and buy something that is there on display, then—at least on a superficial level (and perhaps more deeply as well)—you have bought art. We'll leave this question to the philosophers of a non-experimental variety, especially as we have a more definitive kind of art to discuss.



For, as Old Ken was visiting the ICA recently, a curious character with the sign protruding from his pack was not only doing performance art but alerting the world to a screening of his film about the spoliation of a series of sculptures by Jacob Epstein from the Strand in London during the 1930s. Apparently, our artist-friend stood on the Strand with signs denoting the names and locations of the sculptures over the course of the spring—a performance that was filmed and cut down to a mere 16 minutes. Old Ken has to concede that he never saw this fellow in action on the Strand; but then again, there are loads of folks with placards on that fine street, mostly advertising things like Pizza Hut and delicious steak and kidney pies for sale. Perhaps this might lead us into further relfections on art and commodity culture; but for now, let's just say those words I learned as a young lad: I love Art (Garfunkel)!

What in the World is that Giant Stucco Anteater Doing?

Perhaps there are some places that you have been to a few times, but—given some chance, serendipitous twist of happenstance—you are given the opportunity to see said location in an entirely new way. Now, place and revelatory circumstance will of course alter; Old Ken, for one, knows that he will never look at his flat in quite the same way after a session of projectile vomiting on the bedroom door a few weeks back. But, happily, the reconceptualization we have at hand here is nothing so nauseating; if anything, it might be considered sickeningly exciting. Well, maybe that is a bit of stretch.

Now, for some reason I did not share this with you, but, during my visit from a famous anthropologist about a month ago, we made a visit to Crystal Palace Park. A brief primer on Crystal Palace Park: apparently, the famous glass palace (of the eponymous, mid-nineteenth century exhibition) was moved to South London from Hyde Park in the later 1850s. Subsequently giving name to this area of Sydenham, the crystal palace was installed at the top of a hill and fitted out within a large and lovely park. Although the palace itself has long since burned, the famous anthopologist and Old Ken had a lovely afternoon of making rubbings of the hieroglyphs on the muscled skins of large, sculptural sphinxes which once marked the formal boundaries of the palace complex. Other delightful scenes Old Ken has observed on previous visits to the park include: a maze; a rusty, brutalist bandstand on which Bruce Springsteen (supposedly) performed; the Crystal Palace Anglers' Club fishing pond; a bouncy castle; and a go-cart track.



Well, friends Tim and Bev—currently residents of Crystal Palace, but who are departing for Nottingham all too soon—alerted yours truly to an amazing and previously unknown facet of the park design. Apparently, even prior to Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species, the progressively-minded designers of the exhibition had planned the uphill walk to the Palace as a kind of stroll through history. While the glass palace at the summit was to represent the culmination of human—or Man's, to use the terminology of the time—achievement, at the base of the hill were some historically novel and very curious inhabitants: dinosaurs. Consulting the BBC website, I see that one Richard Owen, the Victorian anatomist who devised the name "dinosaur," was also involved in concocting this amazing display. And again, despite Old Ken's affinity to Crystal Palace Park and abiding affection for dinosaurs, I had never known of—let alone seen—these curious beasts. Until now!



Given the substantial deterioration of the sphinxes mentioned above and other free-standing period scultpures in the park, I was shocked at the wonderful state of these dinosaurs. As it turns out, they have only recently been made accessible to the public after a substantial refurbishment. And what a sight they are!



I will not go through the catalogue of all we can see on display, but will instead allow you the flickering frisson as your eyes play across this exercise in haunting dinosaur realism.



Old Ken does wonder a bit about scale here, as we see something of a conversation piece between what would seem to be a leviathan of an icthyosaur and a very daintily proportioned plesiosaur. But who am I to quibble with the artistry?



Old Ken found the propect afforded by the extreme eastern edge of the Dinosaur Lake to be the most satisfying glimpse into our Jurassic past. In the foreground of the photograph above, it seems as though we have arrived just in time to catch the exchange of pleasantries between two massive turtle-toad beasts. As gentle plesiosaurs wriggle in the left middle distance, the majestic golden wings of a pair of adult pterodactyls can just be made out in near the center of the image, wings spread as they, no doubt, cry forth in their shrill, piercing call: AOUYYYGHTUOOOUGHAYOOO!



And even the ostensible ancestors of Twinkle-toes, the very frightening crocodile, are well represented, authentically situated in such a way was to demonstrate their interest in gardening and flower arrangement. As amazing as these dinosaurs are, though, is it justified to show a gigantic anteater having the sort of, em, relationship with a tree as suggested in the photo at the top?

I Love Art (Garfunkel)

Summer is in the air in old London town. Away (thank goodness) go those ridiculous furry boots, and out come the halter tops. Thankfully, the ratios of evil golf shirts to male suffers of the dreaded Dunlop's disease seem to be lower here than in other places that Old Ken has lived. But, whether we take one good sniff in the Tube or just count the tube tops on the Strand, the signs of approaching summer are ripe for the picking!

As if to embrace this buoyant, breezy moment, the Barbican Gallery has staged a show called "Colour After Klein." Now, don't get Old Ken wrong here; I think Yves Klein's work is pretty interesting (an example of which can be seen photographed above). Not only was he a Rosicrucian (!), but he patented a color (International Klein Blue or IKB) and did these completely bizarre (and probably deeply objectifying/misogynist) performance pieces in the 1960s where he would have naked women cover themselves with his patented pigment and, ah, smear themselves on massive canvases. All the while, a symphony would be sawing away in the background. Oh, Art!



Nonetheless, the organizing principle of this show at the Barbican seems to be: art comes in different colours. Privileging the sensual over the theoretical is probably a good idea at times; but the curators of this show seem to have gone for this approach whole hog. Consider the sweet, sweet anti-intellectualism of the following statement from the gallery guide: "'Colour After Klein' isn't about colour rules or theories. Instead it takes pleasure in the rapport between the aesthetic and the conceptual, and the emotive responses colour arouses." To which the O.K. says: thank you, Genius-head!

This is not to say that there aren't some lovely, vertiginous moments to be had staring into Klein's bizarre canvases. But, for all of its talk of color, the Old Ken was more struck by the smells involved in this art than anything else. The piece by James Lee Byars, which you see photographed above, had been constructed with real roses, which were beginning to rot. Not only did this give off quite a stench, but it was literally attracting flies. (I did alert a guard to the fact that there was a fly on the art, but he seemed unconcerned. Could I blame him? He was reading about Wayne Rooney in Metro). Further, several of the galleries on the second level of the exhibition space had recently been fitted with new carpet, which emitted a positively revolting smell. So, did this assertiveness of color produce something like a synaesthetic effect, heightening awareness to some kind of sympathetic resonances between the five senses? Computer says no. Rather, as all of this potentially interesting art had been sufficiently decontextualized such that the only salient link between the pieces seemed to be presence of color, I felt like I was desperately looking for other angles to dislodge this tedious triviality.



It was only when I reached the final gallery and saw the amazing work you see above (by an artists whose name I was unfortunately not able to get) that I made some inroads. As you can see, this collage has as much to tell us about the use of color in the later twentieth century as "The Wizard of Oz" might have done in the first half. Indeed, I think the invocation of the Wizard is not entirely inappropriate here. For, clearly, we have a Dorothy-type figure who has magically been transported away from her drab, monotonous Kansas into a kaleidoscopic Munchkinland where dreams really do come true. Could there possibly be any higher dream than this? Thank you, Art.