Backbone

My classmate and friend Josh gave me some feedback recently on a presentation that I gave about my research and this blog. His response, I think, provides ballast for my sometimes unsteady stream of consciousness. Here is an excerpt:

Hey Ben,

I enjoyed your presentation and wanted to give some feedback. You kinda got the shaft being last and late after so many presenters.  Despite all that, you inspired some thoughts that I wanted to pass along for whatever they are worth.

First I’d like to say that, having explored your website a bit, your craftsmanship is excellent and your aesthetic is unique and refined. I also appreciate the time you take to outline your main motivations on your blog; something I have been meaning to do for some time. It is on the conceptual level of your work that I will comment for it is the part I am not 100% sold on. I mean this as a constructive criticisms and I take the time to express it because your work is already very compelling.

I have no doubt that your future work will be both visually and conceptually compelling and I really like how you’ve looked at history and seek to point out it’s ironies. If I offer anything it is a, hopefully productive, challenge to what seems to be the main muse of your work at this time; namely, the scientific position that we exist to survive. And to a large extent this is supported by the facts as we know them. However, I would posit that there is something even deeper not only in mankind, but in your work that I respectfully suggest exists. To give it a name I will call this motivation, refinement.

One of your blog entries mentions this motivation in title only, but I suspect it is at least partly a motivation for you and others. In short, a pure survival agenda does not account for many people we know well, namely artists, designers, NGOs, non-profits and the like. What compels you to make an art that has no perceivable purpose beyond your own satisfaction or perhaps some desire to refine the perspectives of viewers? One may argue that there is some collective desire to survive that transcends the individual welfare. This may explain our forefathers who risked their own lives and the measured corporal autonomy of many others in the pursuit of a “more perfect union”. This idea of collective survivalism is interesting, but it is important to note that it is offered in the absence of significant scientific justification. Furthermore, such an idea’s purpose is to justify the very scientific theory that fails to explain the true gamut of human behavior; rendering it a circular argument absent further empirical evidence.

This is not to say that Darwin is wrong any more than Einstein’s theory of relativity rendered Newtonian classical mechanics “wrong”. One might say that Einstein’s work made Newton’s work more right; a collective project of

refinement if you will. Certainly no one would deny the necessities of sustaining life, but is this, or some derivation, all that motivates? Is survivalism the only way to explain our species’ motivation? Surely, I should stick to architecture and my father should have been a banker like his father instead of an artist if securing fitness and genetic succession is all that matters.

It’s all just food for thought, and, again, it is only offered because the quality of your work and thoughts begs a quality debate.  Keep up the good work and feel free to tell me I am full of shit…just don’t forget to tell me why.

Cheers,

Josh

The evolution of warfare is something that has never interested me much. My curiosity about the world however has increased with age and led me in a direction that has revealed connections between our existence, survival and reasons for going to war. These connections are what I have become very interested in, and consequently are now the impetus for my artwork.

 For instance, up until the end of the eighteenth century the armies of the world were still considered to be royal dynastic. That is, they were built from a combination of feudal and mercenary forces that were, in most cases, only formed in the immediate run up to a war. It was common for the monarchy in any given country to use his noble class of citizens to command as officers while conscripting forces from surrounding or other foreign lands. This varied of course with the wealth of the king and little to do with loyalties to the countries at war.

 The concept of the dynastic army differed from that of the modern national army in that it followed a similar structure to the social class system of the day (especially in England and Russia where the hereditary nobility were placed in most of the commissioned ranks limiting the military careers of those without a hereditary claim). Additionally, the purchase system was something that thrived during this time within these armies. It was a system by which an officer could buy his rank. As a result of this the rank of colonel was rarely passed by anyone without the financial means or the support of a patron. (The notion of having a patron in war is intriguing enough to make a body of work on alone.) Officers commonly used the sale of their commissions to live off of after their retirement. This of course limited those with less wealth and allowed the rich to dominant yet another facet of society. This concept raises huge questions as to the qualification of these officers, or lack of, and what that translated to on the battlefield.

 This practice was so prominent during the reign of Tsar Peter II that over one hundred years after his death, the general list of officers in the Russian Army was still predominantly filled with German names. These men had been the descendants of the thousands of soldiers conscripted by Russia from the surrounding Germanic states during the Tsar’s military campaigns who settled and started families in Russia. Tsar Peter was credited with changing his society all but completely because of this huge influx of foreign culture.

In order to keep them selves in positions of power, the Tsar and noble class had to employ other, harsher means of recruitment for the much larger, enlisted branch of the army. Those considered the undesirable elements of society were forced by “press gangs” to join. These men were trained much the way soldiers are today, to be obedient and efficient. They were housed in barracks and guarded camps under the threat of violent punishment to reduce desertion, which was a first step toward the structure of the modern armies of today.

 This is all interesting to me because it fits with my idea of survival. In this case, the group of people (or tribe, as I mentioned in an earlier post) that was maneuvering for power was the wealthy noble class. They had constructed and established a social system that kept them selves in a position of power and realized that it had to be protected. By assigning authority over the conscripted armed forces to others i.e. professional or more experienced soldiers, (Remember, there was little national loyalty at the time) they would have been risking their own power and control. For the sake of protecting that, they decided to do the job themselves.