Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 5
"Ethics and aesthetics are one"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Natalia Gonzalez
Sometimes Doing Nothing Leads to Something
Washing the dishes is a tedious practice, one that can be a time for brooding and contemplation. Potentially, this ordinary chore contains the value of aesthetics – to resist automatization. Unless one has an automatic dishwasher, in which case one has already given in to automatization in exchange for some more free time.
If stuck with the manual, hand-washed process, one is obligated to make decisions about how it is done. Among the variables is speed, which counters quality when the dishes are done in haste. The economic attitude runs parallel to the environmental one; i.e. economy with regard to the use of soap and water. Yet many people seem to use the profligate approach in which, for instance, the water is left running until all of it is washed.
Among those decisions, strategies for washing and rinsing can take elaborate directions: first scrub all plates, then rinse them all; or go through the complete cycle one plate at a time, or one group at a time, or by level of difficulty. These choices become narrowed down the more time that elapses with the dishes unwashed. When they are forsaken, the task becomes longer, more costly, more toxic, and messier.
Aesthetics, itself often a messy issue, can be perceived in anything – Bachelard would find it in a shell or in a drawer When washing the dishes is seen aesthetically, the action becomes a sign- it refers to something outside of its ordinary range of meaning. The value of dishwashing no longer stands in the practicality of cleaning, but in its unfolding. An aesthetic manifestation needs somebody who is looking, but it is also there as somebody is creating; so the aesthetic moment involves the ethics of both producer and observer, if a producer is involved.
The blurriness between aesthetic and practical action is present in Francis Alÿs´ performance work, Paradox of Praxis (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997 (see video here). He is filmed pushing a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City, leaving a melted trail of water until it reduces to the size of a small pebble that he kicks through the street. His action takes place in broad daylight, among other passersby. The sight of workers who haul material on foot through Mexico City is not uncommon- it would be normal in this video were it not for the fact that his movement of this material in this way degrades it to nonexistence. His gestures might refer as much to the futility of ill-paid labor as to the impracticality of making art. Yet in the ethics of Alÿs’ performance, the effort of manual labor, like pushing a block of ice, leaves no trace of itself, ethically a zero carbon footprint save for the video documentation.
Documentation, dishes, and why we do them… it’s a messy business.
Mukařovský, Jan. Structure, Sign, and Function, Trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner. Vail-Ballou Press. New York, 1978, pp. 17-22.
Volume 1, Issue 5
"Ethics and aesthetics are one"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Natalia Gonzalez
Sometimes Doing Nothing Leads to Something
Washing the dishes is a tedious practice, one that can be a time for brooding and contemplation. Potentially, this ordinary chore contains the value of aesthetics – to resist automatization. Unless one has an automatic dishwasher, in which case one has already given in to automatization in exchange for some more free time.
If stuck with the manual, hand-washed process, one is obligated to make decisions about how it is done. Among the variables is speed, which counters quality when the dishes are done in haste. The economic attitude runs parallel to the environmental one; i.e. economy with regard to the use of soap and water. Yet many people seem to use the profligate approach in which, for instance, the water is left running until all of it is washed.
Among those decisions, strategies for washing and rinsing can take elaborate directions: first scrub all plates, then rinse them all; or go through the complete cycle one plate at a time, or one group at a time, or by level of difficulty. These choices become narrowed down the more time that elapses with the dishes unwashed. When they are forsaken, the task becomes longer, more costly, more toxic, and messier.
Aesthetics, itself often a messy issue, can be perceived in anything – Bachelard would find it in a shell or in a drawer When washing the dishes is seen aesthetically, the action becomes a sign- it refers to something outside of its ordinary range of meaning. The value of dishwashing no longer stands in the practicality of cleaning, but in its unfolding. An aesthetic manifestation needs somebody who is looking, but it is also there as somebody is creating; so the aesthetic moment involves the ethics of both producer and observer, if a producer is involved.
The blurriness between aesthetic and practical action is present in Francis Alÿs´ performance work, Paradox of Praxis (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997 (see video here). He is filmed pushing a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City, leaving a melted trail of water until it reduces to the size of a small pebble that he kicks through the street. His action takes place in broad daylight, among other passersby. The sight of workers who haul material on foot through Mexico City is not uncommon- it would be normal in this video were it not for the fact that his movement of this material in this way degrades it to nonexistence. His gestures might refer as much to the futility of ill-paid labor as to the impracticality of making art. Yet in the ethics of Alÿs’ performance, the effort of manual labor, like pushing a block of ice, leaves no trace of itself, ethically a zero carbon footprint save for the video documentation.
Documentation, dishes, and why we do them… it’s a messy business.
Mukařovský, Jan. Structure, Sign, and Function, Trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner. Vail-Ballou Press. New York, 1978, pp. 17-22.
