hammerhead rabbits

Archive for the ‘officialdom’ Category

Max Frisch’s questionnaires

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

I’ve found a very useful piece of context for my questionnaire. It’s a book by the playwright Max Frisch called
'Sketchbook 1966-1971'. It features a series of questionnaires that pose some quite challenging questions. There are nine or ten of these questionnaires in the book and each one takes on a different theme. These questionnaires were quite highly acclaimed when the book was released. I can’t help but feel a lot of them are quite reductive though. A lot of it seems to be a Socratic form of argument with Frisch bullying people into sharing his beliefs.

Each questionnaire consists of twenty five questions. Here’s a sample of questions from the different questionnaires:

The human condition in general

• Are you sure you are really interested in the preservation of the human race once you and all the people you know are no longer alive? State briefly why.
• If you had the power to put into effect things you consider right, would you do so against the wishes of the majority (yes or no) Why not if you think they are right?
• What in your opinion do others dislike about you, and what do you dislike about yourself? If not the same thing, which do you find it easier to excuse?

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500 word group crit text

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

In my project, I set out to make a history of the word ‘all’. I have decided to approach this by making a questionnaire. I will ask people to help me in compiling a database of thoughts about this word. The project has become more of an assessment of the word’s present state with a view to looking both backward and forward.

I’d like to invoke our old friend Marcel Duchamp and his increasingly familiar lecture ‘The Creative Act’. In this lecture he said that the audience has always been crucial in completing an artwork, in the way they bring their own thoughts and experience to it. In this piece I’m making that viewer process the focus of the work. I think thinking was probably always going to be the more exciting bit of this project, not looking, as in a lot of art. That’s the nature of the linguistic and philosophical questions I’m dealing with.

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January 23rd 2008

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Here's my proposal as it is at the moment. It still needs work in several areas.

Propoosal Rough Draft

And here's my proposal presentation. This repeats a lot of what is in the proposal but it's a bit more concise.

Propoosal Presentation