i5 scenes from Malta 2006

Just a sampling of scenes from our iai Malta 2006 trip. We will use a new IAI_Malta.07 blog to post images from last year's trip and new information about Malta. We will include all the same links and keep us all of connected for easy referencing. Gotta go and do the new blog. Until later.

Inquiry Malta 2007, March 24 thru April 3

Independent Art Inquiries Inc. has just sent out their ebro with all the details on the next IAI art adventure. We are planning a return to wonderful and inspiring Malta. It will be based on V Jane Gordon's Inquiry Method but with the new updated and appended versions. We have added 2 more days and hope to take advantage of all the experience we garnered last time.

It will still be a shared artistic experience - an opportunity to create, continue or expand an existing independent project with the support of Inquiry Collective members and the other participants. This adventure is a dynamic art experience that supports self-directed art exploration within a collegial environment, directed by the Inquiry Method exercises. Everyone participates at their own level of interest and goals - whether it be intensive artistic dialogue, art creation, or simply gathering materials, photos and experiences for future work. Artists work in their choice of media, locations, sites and subject/s.

Some participants' comments from Malta 2006:

“The inquiry method has been absolutely essential and transformative.”

“I feel I understand much more fully what it means to be engaged in this way.
I am very satisfied and grateful to have experienced this.”

“it was great to have local and visiting artists join our discussions”

As we prepare for this coming year, we are all getting excited and back to blogging.

i5 inquiry.interesting site

Music video which is affected by the viewer's local time and weather.

back in the new world

hello all inquirers. here back in the new world again,
i would like to thank you all for your committed participation.
it was a jam packed week and you made it a great and memorable experience.
please continue your inquiries and consider using a blog to stay in touch.
rika

A suggestion from Dean

http://michaelshannon.us/makeabook/

Question: What is the Athenian Symposium?

The greek word for a drinking party is symposium.These get togethers were "dedicated to a varying blend of eating, drinking, games of all sorts, philosophical discourse and public sex with prostitutes, concubines and other men, but never with wives."

The prostitutes or as they were called in greek, hetaeri,were the more refined of their profession and by participating in the symposiums (symposia?) it allowed them access to an element of male society not available to most women. Even with this privilege it did not seem to advance their status in society nor gain the respect from their symposium colleagues.

Sexual power and domination over the prostitutes was used to demean the older ones and confer favour on the younger women. A young man would be introduced to the symposium and the hetaeri in order to "liberate him from the awe of his mother and any other female authority figures." It seems that teaching them to humiliate and dominate a woman is what they thought it took to cut the apron strings.

These symposia took place in the men's quarters of private homes. This area would be the largest and most luxurious in the home and accessible directly from the outside so as not to disturb the wives and children. A typical symposium evening would unfold something like this.
Dinner (peppered with philosophical discourse), washing of hands, a toast of libations to the gods, female musicians perform, inebriation, female flute and harp playing, sex (rough, anal and oral) with whomever.
It seems the women did everything: music, dance, conversation, song and sex. I'm not sure who did the cooking, maybe it was the wife?

Question: Would it be good to revive?
Answer: Did they ever go away? Now we have strip clubs and sex slaves and not much conversation.

The preceeding is my summary of a chapter from The Reign Of The Phallus-Sexual Politics In Ancient Athens by Eva C. Keuls, University of California Press, 1985

Ger

The Salon; marginal and subversive...continued

Quote #5

...gave way to a more anonymous style of sociability, oriented towards spectacles and celebrities and centred not only on salons but on le Boulevard, where shopping, the cafe, and the activities of a whole constellation of new and exclusive social clubs accommodated a larger more heterogeneous society. pg 189

Questions #5

• What is the place of the generalist in today's world?
• Is shopping the great leveler leading us to a non-
hierarchical world of consumption?
• What is the relationship between the spectacle and anonymity?
What would you call a spectacle in your world?

Quote #6

...the decadence of conversation could be blamed on crinnoline , which "invaded [women's ] moral life, debased their character by destroying their influence , reduces their field of action, and narrowed the terrain of their ambition. " pg. 209

Questions #6

• Do we live in a world where lots of brainy women have a strong
public presence in their own right?
• Is fashion a place where differences come together to create
a new civil world order?
• what does the obsession with physical beauty
and decoration do to the female brain?
and what is it doing to the male brain?
And what does it do to their interactions?

The Salon; marginal and subversive...continued

Quote #3

As the values of the market place progressively took precedence over the dictates of social and cultural discrimination, salonnieres imperceptibly lost the ability to select guests according to talent , intelligence or L'esprit. The triumph of the star system made it harder and harder to tell the difference between innate ability, earned reputation and the kind of glory [ celebrity] conferred by public success... Pg 163

Questions #3

• Why do celebrity opinions outside their own field merit attention?
• Is this quote relevant to a description or discussion of contemporary mass media?
• Can you find a relationship between the sentiments in this quotation and the society in which you live?
• Did you see the interview with Britney Spears about how she voted?

Quote #4

Madame de Stael had set the tone for a mondain critique of "the party system" in the 1790's by noting that partisanship united people around common hatreds rather than feelings of friendship and mutual esteem. The morality of mondain relations, she argued, suffered when those with "the same political religion" excused the vices of their allies and ignored the positive qualities of their foes... Pg 167

Questions #4

• what is the vehicle in our culture, or global culture, which facilitates the coming together of people with different political "religions" or different artistic "religions" or different religions to, discuss differences civilly and create a larger world?
• Is there a difference between tolerance and acceptance?

Interesting Creative Project and Blog

The Salon; marginal and subversive, its relevance and history

Kale, Stephen, French Salons, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004

Quote #1

Madame de Stael worked to make her salon a new Athenian symposium where those responsible for the government of men could cultivate the wisdom necessary to bring reason and virtue into the art of making policy and writing legislation. Pg 52

Questions #1

• Could you call government policy-making and legislation-writing an "art"
being practiced in Ottawa?
• What is the Athenian symposium?
• Would it be a good thing to revive? Has it already been done?

Quote #2

[under Louis xviii] ...doubts about the political influence of salons centred on two forms of deception, one involving the use of elegant manners by charlatans to give them selves an "illusory importance " and the other concerning the ability of the mediocre to silence merit with ridicule and lower the general political intelligence of society. Pg 100

Questions #2

• If we substitute the name of an "all news channel " or a "cable network" for
the word "salon" in the quote above, does anything specific come to mind ?
• Does history repeat itself?

The Conversational Salon

The Conversational Salon

Some not so idle chitchat by Sophie Anne Edwards

Somewhere along the oral line, the act and locus of conversing has diminished along with the meaning of conversation itself.

While discussion and dialogue have been critical forms of exchange and idea development for centuries, we now are more familiar with e-mail and short forms. We email rather than call; when we must call, we hope for the answering machine so we can simply leave a message.

Perhaps the general dissolution of the art of conversation and the lack of the deliberate locus for it, has left us fearful of modern oral exchange – the idle chitchat, the gossip, the meaningless talk that form the bulk of our vocal exchanges.

The New Penguin Dictionary, 2001 (all definitions herein attributable to same) defines Converse: verb intrans. 1. to exchange thoughts and opinions in speech; to talk. 2. to carry on an exchange similar to a conversation; esp. to interact with a computer.

Interact with a computer? Even I was surprised at that. How did the art of conversation diminish to the point that it can now be defined as something that does not even entail an exchange between two living beings?

Where once conversation entailed a movement toward greater understanding or interaction, it now means little more than talk. Talk is just sound created by air passing over our vocal cords. Conversation once meant that intelligence and thought directed the sounds we created.

In the 1800s, the conversational salon, while in the private sphere of the woman’s space, was publicly influential; and was used as a tool for dialogue. Salons gathered people of all classes and both genders together to discuss and debate issues and ideas – adherents were intelligent, thoughtful, insightful and interested in change. The women ‘dirigentes’ of the salons invited literary figures, artists, politicians, philosophers, and writers. These women were influential, respected and often powerful.

The salon has been subverted over time, to the point that it now most commonly refers to: Salon: 1. a commercial establishment where hairdressers, beauticians, couturiers, etc. see their clients. 2. an elegant reception room or living room. This indeed reflects the reality that chitchat and gossip are now more associated with salon than true conversation.

A conversable person, is: 1. literary pleasant and easy to converse with: Mrs. Bardel let lodgings to many conversable single gentlemen – Dickens. 2. archaic. Relating to or suitable for conversation or social interaction.

Through salons, women were influencing society and politics; over time, adherance to societal norms subverted this act of conversation through salon. Women became good hostesses, rather than animators and activists – the host became the polite conversationalist, the one serving biscuits and tea, rather than the true conversationalist, asking pointed questions and creating discussion.

Elizabeth Fay, in a University of Massachusetts paper wrote:

“I would like to remark first on what I mean by "salon theory." The eighteenth-century salon, which was so crucial to the development and intellectual projects of the first generation Bluestockings, was more than anything a place where the mind could flourish through the exchange of ideas. If witticisms and literary flourishes despoiled some of this exchange, so much the better since this provided a socially acceptable cover for what could be talked about. To think that, like the earlier coterie gatherings, men and women could get together and talk about ideas. Talk, rather than writing and its exchange, fosters thought by association; ideas can spiral, vine about, bloom in odd ways when no one Socrates figure is directing the flow of things. Because salons encouraged people to cluster together in small groups, many conversations occurred simultaneously. Less than a room of one's own, more than a seat in a family parlor, the salon offered women in particular a place to be intellectual. Moreover, the role of conversation—the exchange of words and ideas, rather than a lecture; the equitable pitting of topics, the easy chance of digressions, the richness of associable ideas and inferences—is valued in Bluestocking salons. It should be valued today for its open-endedness, its plausible leads, its intellectual heritage. It is invaluable for women students who find the tension of seminar discussions a block to verbalizing their ideas, but it is equally helpful to men students by providing a platform for hashing out ideas before seminar meetings, while provoking them to examine their assumptions in light of their colleagues' reactions.

We are said to have lost the art of conversation in the present age, but that is a reference to parlor talk; we have indeed lost the tool of conversation, and that is something we could and should remedy, because students should not have to think in isolation, should not have wrestle with ideas on their own, should not come to erroneous versions of history or literature because they did not have to try out their version on someone else.”

And so, in that spirit - to embrace the art, and embody the act, i5 now launches it’s online salon – not as an electronic replacement for the exchange between people in person, but as an adjunct to our upcoming in situ Salon Series in Malta.

Perhaps the technology of our age can be used to support the intelligent practices of previous ones.

VJane Gordon's Show in Valetta

Touchstones, The Hybrid Prints 25 March till 30 April, 2006

Opening at 8:00 pm on March 31, 2006
in Valetta at the St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity.

See the announcement in the St James Cavalier Centre's website
by using the link in the title of this post.

Churches of Malta

Interesting link about the history of The Knights of The Order of St John and the architecture of the churches in Malta and of paricular interest is the only signed painting by Caravaggio. (Link sent to me by Eric Farache and to quote him
"Caravagio as you may know, was quite the Baroque over the top character and standing in front of one of his paintings will consume you.")

Monica Spitera, another image

Monica Spitera, a Maltese artist

Symbolic Imagery of Archaie Gems - Fertility and Creativity. A series of works by Monica Spiteri, a Maltese artist. These 40 pieces are inspired by arhaeological heritage and culture.

Site has a good map of the exhibits.

National Museum of Archaeology of Malta in Valletta.
Site has a good map of the exhibits.

or visit the Museum the links list.

Interesting Malta

Lots or interesting and relevant brochures for downloading
which Don found for us.

You can get info on the islands in general, walks, beaches,
museums, historic sites, culture and the list goes on.

thanks Don

For those that like to dive!

For diving enthusiasts, Malta's waters hold a Bleinheim bomber, a submarine, various other wrecks, natural caves and a large variety of sealife. Tour companies offer single dive, multiple dive and training options.

Malta Archaeology

Another link to overview of the geological sites in Malta which may be of interest to the 'Inquirers'.

Valletta - A 16th Century City

All about Valetta. Great overview of the sites and things to see and do.
rika

All Malta is just one big film-set for Spielberg’s Munich

I think this link would be of interest to lots of our participants

VJ

Cerridwen Salon for the Multi-Arts

Cerridwen is the name of the Celtic Goddess who presided over the sacred cauldron of wisdom and inspiration. These salons are centered on particular themes: Women's Myth and Ritual, Ripening (Aging), and Women and Earth Ecology. They present full programs of works by women in different artistic media of expression relating to the same theme.

An brief exerpt from the letter linked in the post title. Read the entire letter and follow their links through for more history and information on the Cerridwen Salon.

www.usc.edu/isd/archives/womens_salons/background/radcliffe_letter1.html

The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons

An interesting article on the history of salons.

About St James Cavalier

If you would like to know more about the St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity please follow the link to the website and consider subscribing to their newsletter. It will keep you posted about all the interesting things going on at the centre.

VJane Gordon's exhibition at the Cavalier Centre will be opening during the i5 Malta Inquiry.

Surfaces and Rapture_the hybrid prints

Installation complete March 24 2006

Opening March 31 2006

Closing April 28 2006

These works spring from an intimate embodied experience of knowing and touching Canadian Stone. They are large 40 x 52 inch layered images on paper beginning with lithographs or relief prints from Niagara Escarpment limestone and drawings of Canadian Shield precambrian rock. She has added to these prints: photo documentation of her outdoor works and interventions, texts familiar and invented, sketchbook studies, records of her travels from the escarpment to the shield and back and a suggestion of satellite touches from above as they orbit over the vast geography of the Canadian landscape.

Dual Pricing of Goods

This article may be of interest to those of you travelling
with i5 to Malta this spring.

Gozo’s unique archaeological treasures to return home

more from The Malta Independent Online.

Safeguarding Malta's Heritage

Another interesting article discovered by VJane.

Scenes from Malta

Check out this link – came across it today – whets the appetite
Don

Happy Malta

Article VJane found in her daily Malta scan.