April 13, 2015 - 08:56
except I'm still having trouble just *being here,* am still time traveling...
to last spring, when the bundt cakes were in action here.
For a week, students tentatively played with the cakes, rearranging and reassessing their placement, stepping into the role of “artist." But over the weekend--to the great distress of the artist--the entire display was dispersed and scattered around campus. To me, this seemed a continuation of the same playful and interactive spirit that prompted the installation; placing the cakes around the campus was another way of “rearranging” the installation so that it became part of the environment itself. 
Remembering this takes me back to our discussions, last week, of property and propriety, our questioning whether ownership is ecologically constructive. Systems of higher education teach students to value ownership of what they create--be it sculpture or ideas--through (among other things) strict policies about plagiarism. But claiming ownership can mean refusing to acknowledge all the ways in which what we do and say is both a taking-up-of and implicated in what all others are doing-and-saying....
That classtime we spent near the graveyard in Morris Woods evoked a different dimension of this for me: that attempt @ permanence, quietly being covered over by "nature," reminiscent of so much fragility and impermance, seemed yet another example of the impossibility of "boundedness"...