Our God is Speed

The Cowbell as Alien to the German Spirit

2012-03-01T17:36:00.003-05:00

Charlie Mingus gives it his best Nazi try.

Anti-entartete Gestapo regulations for playing jazz, circa Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia:

Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;
in this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones (so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;
so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);
strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);
also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);
the double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;
plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;
musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);
all light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.

Via.

Cross-reference with: Raoul Hausmann on German gastronomy.

A Straggling Sidenote on 'Collage Culture'

2012-02-29T15:50:00.003-05:00

Richard Prince, Untitled (Living Rooms), detail, c. 1977

While reading Retromania some months ago, I was surprised to see that Simon included a brief discussion of the work of visual artist Sherrie Levine and other artists of the "Pictures Generation" in relation to the acts of sampling and pop-culture quotation in music. Curiously enough, the subject of the early '80s "appropriation art" has a huge bearing on some of the concerns raised by Simon (in relation to music) throughout the course of his book.

The short explanation of the much of the appropriation art that emerged out of the NYC artworld of the late 1970s and early 1980s was that it all had to do with some post-structuralist commentary on Roland Barthes's theory of the "death of the author" in connection with certain postmodernist misgivings about the idea of creative originality. But the practice of appropriation was employed to different ends by different artists. Levine's rephotographing of works by (male) master photographers like Walker Evans, Edward Weston and Alexander Rodchenko was supposed to be a critique of the patriarchal exclusivity of the modern artistic canon; the work of Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger involved deconstructions of the visual rhetoric of advertising and consumer culture; while Cindy Sherman's brilliantly staged and photographed "film stills" and portraits addressed issues of gender roles as represented and reinforced by popular media.*

In 1982, Barbara Kruger published a short text titled "'Taking' Pictures" to accompany the reproduction of some of her work in the Oxford-based journal Screen. In retrospect, Kruger's text -- to what limited degree it's been republished and discussed over the years -- proved prescient. Writing a few years in advance of any concrete critical terminology having settled around postmodernist or appropriation art, Kruger addressed the practice of taking (or quoting) images "informed by fashion and journalistic photography, advertising, film, television, and even other artworks..., their quotations suggest a consideration of the work's 'original' use and exchange values, thus straining the effects of naturalism." That naturalism to which Kruger refers being the standardized visual language of consumer culture, the act of quoting being a means of -- by way of irony and deconstruction -- disrupting the syntax of that visual language by isolating and estranging its various "signifiers," thereby critiquing the ideological underpinnings of the dominant culture by folding its own coded rhetoric back upon itself. Or so the theory had it, at least.

But in the third and final paragraph of "'Taking' Pictures," Kruger expresses some nagging doubts about the practice of appropriation:

"On a parodic level, this work can pose a deviation from the repetition of stereotype, contradicting the surety of our initial readings. However, the implicit critique within the work might easily be subsumed by the power granted its 'original,' thus serving to further elevate cliché. This might prove interesting in the use of repetition as a deconstructive device, but this elevation of cliché might merely shift the ornamental to the religious. And as an adoration the work can be read as either another buzz in the image repertoire of popular culture or as simply a kitschy divinity. However, the negativity of the work, located in its humour, can merely serve to congratulate its viewers on their contemporary acuity."

In other words, quite early in the game Kruger foresaw two possible -- and problematic -- fates lurking in the wings. The first being that a series of enfeebled (re-)representations ends up ceding all authority to its referents – becoming mere degenerative repetitions of its models, thereby buttressing the very discourse it aimed to undermine ("the power granted its 'origins'"). The second outcome is that it lapses into petty and toothless nihilism -- an in-group exercise of smugly insular and effette irony.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

* And I suppose it goes without saying that there was also a strong feminist purport to Kruger's work as well, with her previous experience as the lead graphics editor and designer for Mademoiselle magazine (and other Condé Nast publications) proving doubly useful for dissecting the language of advertising.

Louvre Action (or, We Only Did It for the Monet)

2012-02-28T14:53:00.002-05:00

Of course they're gonna keep a close eye on the teenagers, because everyone knows that kids ain't nothing but trouble. And this is a discriminatory assumption that more often targets those of a particular class and gender, with race being (for once) somewhat less of a consideration than it would be in other contexts. Still, I can't help but wonder if certain culturally-specific attitudes don't factor into this sort of thing as well.

images: Christopher D'Arcangelo: unauthorized

"performance," Musée du Louvre, c. 1976

Interlude

2012-02-27T13:35:00.001-05:00

Carl causes me to remember this incongruous track (top), making it the first time I've heard it in about 30 years, and also making me trip at how it immediately brought the second track/artist to mind.

Anyway: Technical/equipment issues on this end of things. Posting may become a little less frequent until some things get sorted out, remedied, etc.

This is Entertainment, Pt. I

2012-02-22T17:58:00.011-05:00

(Or, A Few Casual Glances in the Rearview Mirror of Production)

Right, so sometime back I wrote about the 'New Black', intrigued by what appeared to be a new and unexpected wrinkle the recent musicscape. Philip Sherburne and a few others had spotted a nascent subtrend on the horizon, some darkness starting to seep in around the edges. Whether of not it -- as a few asserted -- was a response by the younger set to the current conditions and their own diminished futures is arguable. At the very least, what I heard in some of the "new doom" stuff was a return to certain developments in electronic music from back in the mid-to-late nineties; developments which had –as with so much else about electronic music at that point – had either languished or been completely abandoned for the better part of the noughties.

Looking back many over a year later, I can do little more than shrug, because for the most part it doesn't seem to have led much of anywhere. Or at least not anywhere all that interesting. Lately, it seems there's been a glut of by-the-numbers "atmospheric" material bearing overwrought titles ("Burning Torches of Despair," anyone?) like those you usually find in the second-tier Black Metal canon.¹ If that weren't tiresome enough, more recently it's pointing in the direction of a return of Power Electronics version three-point-oh.

At any rate, only reason I raise the matter again is in relation to a couple of Tihm Gabriele's recent columns over at Pop Matters. The most recent of which involves a discussion of the music of Throbbing Gristle in light of the latest round of reissues. In the opening paragraphs, Tihm gets to something I'd long wondered: What's likely to be your response to the music of TG if you've worked your to it through the reverse genealogy – after a long, latter-period steeping in the music of NIN, Ministry, Skinny Puppy and other such 2nd-gen industrial acts? Context is everything, of course, and while recounting his original back-when impressions, Tihm confirms what I'd always suspected -- that your reaction is (initially, at least) quite likely to be one of disappointment, if not confusion. That the music of TG -- so utterly bereft of many of the conventional rock/pop/dance structure and accessorizing niceties of later industrial acts -- is likely to strike such a listener as too rudimentary, too sonically crude and anemic.²

I'll admit that my original exposure -- back in the days that were closer to that in-situ context -- to the "first-wave" source of such stuff wasn't any resounding epiphany or a hugely rewarding success, either. Scrounging around in the early eighties, I first came up with a copy of their soundtrack to Jarman's In The Shadow of the Sun. Intrigued by the alinear nature of the thing -- its buzzing and occasional swelling to abstract densities, interlaced with long of sparse, lulling near-inactivity as filtered through some densely, muddied subaquatic reverb. Intrigued, mind you, but hardly what I'd expected in light of what I'd read about them, had been poised to expect. (I was still a couple years shy of exposure to avant-jazz like Art Ensemble's Paris Sessions or anything of that ilk, so it was new territory for me at the time.)

Greatest Hits soon followed and wound up making little sense to me at the time -- with its schizophrenic mixture of their more ironic pop-satire moments like "Hot on the Heels of Love" and "United" interlaced a smattering of noisier, more abrasive tunes (studio versions, mind you) from the less listener-friendly end of their catalog. A back-and-forth beween two opposite poles, perhaps; poles that (to my ears) fell on either side of The Normal's "Warm Leatherette," but still nothing that suggested anything aesthetically coherent, that pointed the way to larger gestalt. Maybe "Six Six Sixties" and "Blood on the Floor" suggested that TG warranted further investigation, or would I only wind up with more ironically faux-"sensual" Moroderesque disco thumpers? No idea -- too many mixed signals and I was lacking a copy of the codebook. Maybe, I suspected, it wasn't worth the bother.³

It wasn't until, shortly thereafter, I came across live recordings like Thee Psychick Sacrifice and Mission of Dead Souls that it all suddenly -- and very heavily -- fell into place. The loud, distorted electronics squealing through the hubbub; the frayed and viscerally thick bass tones; the improvisational approach to how any given "song" built (whether off of formless amusical meanderings or rifting around or off of some plodding or pummeling minimal rhythm) into a delirious density; all of it often interlaced with borderline unintelligible incantations and alingual howling.

In his recent A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982, author Nic Rombes makes a case for the American Midwest as a bedrock of early American punk -- specifically the "Rust Belt" network of steelworks and port cities that stretched fell along the East Coast and into the Midatlantic states before stretching far inland around the Great Lakes and into the central Plains. It is from these cities, he more or less argues, that the truest, noisiest, and most viscerally raw punk emerged; from the Motor City proto-punk of the Stooges, to the noise kicked up a few years later by the likes of Destroy All Monsters and Cleveland's The Electric Eels, the Pagans, and Rocket From The Tombs/Pere Ubu. In the entry "Cities, decay and beauty of," Rombes describes these parts of the American landscape through the lens of the mid-late 1970s:

"Cities of the American Midwest...approached postapocalyptic dimensions in your imagination. In downtown Toledo, the boarded up buildings offered a visual contradiction that verged on mystery: Here were beautiful building with ornate architectural details but whose windows were covered up with warped plywood. On one level you understood perfectly well what had happened: The perils of the economy were on the news every night. And yet, it still didn't make sense; you wanted to solve the contradiction of ruined beauty, either by restoring beauty or by pushing things further into ruin. Only later would it become clear that while disco had tried to push things back into decadent beauty, punk had tried to push them deeper into ruin. Whether you lived in these cities or not, you knew that what was happening there was a large-scale version of the same disaster that was playing out in small towns."

But a few pages later, the reader finds Rombes ventures in more nuanced territory. In the entry on "Class," Rombes draws a key distinction between American punk and the variety that hailed from the U.K.:

"There was a bit of Mad magazine in American punk from the mid-seventies, the kind of self-deprecating humor that comes from the confidence of empire. I should put my cards on the table now and say this: It comes down to nationalism. As bad as things were economically in the mid-seventies in New York...there was still a deeper assurance that the empire would not collapse."

Admittedly, the "industrial" moniker was a little problematic, or would become so as time wore on. I suspected as much early on. Industrial -- with its ironic echo of Futurism's celebration of technological prosthesis and the subsumption of nature into the modern culture of the machine age, as well as of Rusollo's "art of noises" in the form of mechanical rumblings and automated rhythms. But by some accounts, TG only adopted the term industrial as a cheeky referent to a preferred means of production and distribution of their work, and not as any sort of descriptive (let alone prescriptive) aesthetic.

But still, in a way it seemed appropriate enough at that particular moment in time, evoking as it did images of bleakness and "dehumanization" -- the blight brought about by the encroaching sprawl of manufacturing sector of certain cities, or the sociological decimation resulting when that same sector languished and dwindled in the transition to a post-Fordist economy. Whichever the case, the term was likely to paint a grim or foreboding picture in the listener's mind. But the matter of empire, of one's perception of the society in which one lives, brings something else into the picture -- something that falls between these two impressions, and perhaps connects them. Because whenever the word empire turns up, the concept of decline usually isn't far behind.

But like I said earlier, context (be it in-situ or deferred) plays a big part in the the matter of reception and interpretation -- be it in musical, cultural, or experiential terms. Where and how something fits (or doesn't) into one's frame of reference. About which, more in the next post.

{ end of part one }

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1. If there was one thing that certain proto-/first-wave "goth" acts understood that seems to have been lost on a majority of its later mutations, it's that sense of glam-era camp -- some degree of ironic distanciation from its adopted clichés.
2. For example, an enthusiasm for the "dub-house" output of the German Basic Channel/Chain Reaction imprint doesn't necessarily -- for some listeners, at least -- translate into an automatic appreciation or affinity for its "roots" (e.g., King Tubby et al.).
3. I believe Chris & Cosey's Trance found its way onto my turntable around this time; which didn't help clarify matters by any degree.

None Dare Call It Boho

2012-02-21T10:17:00.008-05:00

I suppose there's a lot one could say about this by way of addressing its errors and inaccuracies and the cards it stacks for the sake of making what amounts to a dubious argument. Little need, though; because one commenter (Christine) has already done a lot of the heavy lifting. Noted that the screed comes via a publication whose subscription rate priced me out of its neighborhood nearly a full decade ago.

This Is Entertainment: Preface

2012-02-21T02:16:00.003-05:00

Yeah, I hate it when bloggers/writers just post a bunch of youtoobage in lieu of actually writing something, don't you?

Circumscribing the Unspoken

2012-02-19T13:21:00.001-05:00

From an interview with Scottish artist Robert Montgomery in the Independent:

"Normal people in the street are much more intelligent than society gives them credit for...

I want the words to appear almost like statements from the collective unconscious, in a sense. They are quite subtle ideas, and poetic ones; sometimes political points mixed with poetic allusions. The words can be complex, so I want them to look as straightforward as possible."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Robert Henke (aka Monolake) speaking to Fact mag about his new album, Ghosts:

"We humans are very, very odd constructions. We have the ability to think about ourselves; we are going to die, and we’re aware of this. Quite an evil construction, actually…we understand and can manipulate how we feel, we can enjoy our lives, we are able to give joy or suffering to other people, but we are still totally at the mercy of something that is absolutely beyond of our control: death. How to cope with this? Religion, mythologies, rituals, drugs, ghosts."

"Music, especially when purely instrumental, is a very ghostly form of art in itself. There is no explicit meaning, there is room for thoughts to wander. ... Music creates non-existing spaces and populates it with all sorts of magic objects. And, of course the creational process of computer-generated music itself is a very bodiless and ghostly experience, similar to the mysterious appearance of an image on photographic paper when exposed in the darkroom."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"LET US SPEAK, then, of the world from which human beings have disappeared.

It's a question of disappearance, not exhaustion, extinction or extermination. The exhaustion of resources, the extinction of species -- these are physical processes or natural phenomena.

And that's the whole difference. The human species is doubtless the only one to have invented a specific mode of disappearance that has nothing to do with Nature's law. Perhaps even an art of disappearance.

LET'S BEGIN WITH the disappearance of the real. [...]"

"...That world is perfectly objective since there is no one left to see it. Having become purely operational, it no longer has need of our representation. Indeed, there no longer is any possible representation of it. [...]"

"...There are those who play on their disappearance, make use of it as a living form, exploit it by excess, and there are those who are in a state of disappearance and who survive it by default. It is clear that the political scene, for example, merely reflects the shadows of a cave and the -- disembodied -- beings that move around in it, but do so quite unwittingly (it would take too long to list everything that has disappeared in this way -- institutions, values, individuals). It is, unfortunately, quite possible that we ourselves, as a species, already form part -- in the form of cloning, computerization and the networks, for example -- of this artificial survival, of this prolongation to perpetuity of something that has disappeared, but just keeps on and on disappearing. Whereas the whole art is to know how to disappear before dying and instead of dying."

-- Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Disappeared
Already? (2007), .pdf version available here.

{ images via }

Bad Faith

2012-02-14T23:50:00.008-05:00

(or, Hanging Out with Pavlov's Dog in Plato's Cave: Some Scattered Postmortem Thoughts on Mike Kelley)

Mike Kelley (third from left) with co-conspirator, 1968

Something done in bad faith can be successful.

When I was in junior high school there was a contest sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to design a patriotic poster. I decided, along with a guy I shared a chemistry-class lab with, to enter the contest. From the very beginning we meant it as a joke. First of all, we agreed to collaborate on the poster so that neither of us would be responsible for the final outcome. Secondly, we were not close friends so we did not care about making each other look talentless. We couldn't have spent more than fifteen minutes on the poster, . . . We picked the most insipid subject matter and statement we could think of. . . We used the cheapest materials,…and painted it as poorly as possible. The flag was depicted as a crude series of stripes with one sloppy star and a totally unrecognizable [George] Washington was painted in a garish combination of chartreuse and green. We won.

-- Mike Kelley, from "Some Aesthetic High Points" (1992)

* * * *

Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile.
Performance featuring Sonic Youth, NYC, 1986.

As all of the bio material has it: Mike Kelley had hailed from the Detroit suburb of Wayne, Michigan; where he was raised in a blue-collar Catholic household, his father being on the maintenance crew at a local high school, his mother a cook at an auto factory. From there he went to Ann Arbor to enroll at the University of Michigan in 1972, and soon joined up with a group of like-minded friends -- fellow art students Jim Shaw, Niagara, and Cary Loren – with whom he formed the band Destroy All Monsters. For Mike Kelley, the inspiration to form a band came from the outer-orbit psychedelic explorations of the late 60s, particularly that of Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, as well as the sonic bombast and absurdist theatrics of The Stooges -- all of which he'd seen play around Detroit in the preceding years, each of whom had left an indelible impression on Kelley. Destroy All Monsters' freeform dadaist antics, however, didn't find a welcome audience in or around Ann Arbor. They were given few opportunities to perform around town, but reputedly made scores of home recordings. Of the cultural climate of Ann Arbor in the early 1970s, Kelley would later write:

"We had all been raised on the psychedelic excesses of the MC5 and the Stooges, and the general feeling of that time: that every form could be combined and all excesses were possible. Now we were in the dark ages. Detroit's economy had collapsed and taken with it its radical culture. Detroit was a dead city. And Ann Arbor, once the 'drug capital of the Midwest,' Eden to every unhappy teenage runaway, home of the SDS, the White Panther Party, and a thriving radical intellectual scene, was now slipping back into being a sleepy and conservative fraternity-row college town. All of the musicians of the previous generation were trying to adapt to the cleaner hard rock sound of the day. ...I believe they were embarrassed at the psychedelic extravagances of their youth. And those of our own age were basking in the mellow sounds of country rock and the tired noodlings of the Alman brothers and the Grateful Dead. Things were very depressing. This was the milieu that birthed Destroy All Monsters. We were designed to be a 'fuck you' to the prevailing popular culture."

Leaving Ann Arbor in 1976, Kelley headed for the West Coast to pursue his studies further at California Institute of the Arts (DAM colleague and lifelong friend Jim Shaw would soon follow). Attending Cal Arts in the late 1970s meant being in an institutional hotbed of contemporary art theory and practice, studying under such luminaries of Conceptual Art like John Baldesarri and Douglas Huebler. After graduation Kelley quickly established himself in the Los Angeles art scene, staging a variety of text-fueled performances works at various spaces around town, playing in a group with artist and fellow Cal Arts alumn Tony Oursler, and eventually meeting and collaborating with performance artist Paul McCarthy.

While the early 1980s were highly productive years for Kelley, he remained a "West Coast artist," gaining only limited attention elsewhere. Partly this could be credited to the NY-centric chauvinism of the American artworld of the time; but it can also be attributed to the ephemeral nature of Kelley's performance-based works and the way such works seldom meet with anything more than a select and temporary audience. For a while his main success in New York came by way of his cross-country association with members of the NYC art and music "underground" -- e.g., his collaborative friendship with the band Sonic Youth.

By 1986 Kelley shifted his focus into making more object-related works -- installations involving "sculptural" elements, graphics, and various wall pieces. It was the more physical, tangible pieces such as "More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid" and "Pay for Your Pleasure" (1987 and 1988, respectively) that proved to be his "breakthrough" -- first landing him an attentive audience in Germany and other European locales, and finally bringing him to full attention of the East Coast art scene. The recognition landed him a slot in the 1992 Los Angeles MCA exhibition Helter Skelter, a survey that included Kelley's work alongside that of Raymond Pettibon, Robert Williams, Lari Pittman. Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw, et al. By the end of the following year, a couple of monographs on Kelley's work appeared; and the artist found himself already being given a career retrospective by the Whitney.

* * * *

Sorting through the artwork of Mike Kelley -- in whatever form it took -- is a difficult undertaking. Firstly this is because of Kelley's creative modus -- always oblique, steeped in deliberate ambiguity and discontinuity, thematic tropes put through their paces by way of lateral thinking and (as the artist himself put it) "games of deferral." The second reason for this is the nature of the discourse -- the limited and repetitive litany of fashionable art-crit concepts -- that coalesced around his work when he first rose to prominence in the early 1990s.

For instance: Looking over the titles of reviews and articles of Kelley's work that appeared during these years illustrates the narrowing set of critical concepts that critics reached for at the time. In 1988 one finds a critic at the Chicago Tribune speaking of "An Element of Truth in Our Kitsch Culture," with Peter Schjeldahl weighing in a few months later on an aesthetic of "The New Blue Collar." But within a couple more years, review titles suggest a set of themes beginning to ossify: "The Pathetic Aesthetic: Making Do with What Is" (Los Angeles Times), "Beyond Redemption" (Artforum), "Portraits of the Artist as a Young Loser" (Wall Street Journal), "The Apocalyptic Vulgarian" (Art & Auction), "Stupidity as Destiny: American Idiot Culture" (Flash Art), "Abject Lessons" (art + text), and "Obscene, Abject, Traumatic" (October).

Like a good many people, it was at this time that I was introduced to the work of Mike Kelley, most often via the second-hand circuit of how it was reproduced and discussed in art magazines, by which it point it was already being firmly and repeatedly framed in terms of abjection, failure, and "trash culture" and "slacker" aesthetics. Again and again the same terms, usually accompanied by the same few select works reprinted to illustrate the author's point. Small wonder that a few critics quickly were quick to react and dismiss Kelley's success, viewing the work as yet another trifling manifestation of Gen-X irony, falling on some hazy point of the cultural spectrum between the Coen Brothers' smug referentially and Quentin Tarantino or Beck's geeky, high-productivist po-mo pastiche.

* * * *

The crux of all this can easily be pinned on the dolls -- the various second-hand knit and cloth animals and figures (and the afghan rugs, as well) that Kelley had collected from thrift stores and incorporated into his work in the late 1980s. For critics and viewers, these items carried loaded psycho-social (as well as –sexual) associations that pointed in the direction of the damaging experiences of childhood. But as the artist later explained, his use of these articles had been prompted by other considerations:

"...I've distanced myself from the neo-Pop Art currently in vogue. I see a lot of art now that mimics popular culture, the look of advertising or fashion photography, modernist design, and so on. It strikes me that much of this work is concerned with a mastery of those visual tropes, that there is some investment mass culture on the level of desire. I'm of another generation, I have a more critical relationship with mass culture. ...At this point, I see a lot of art that seems more than willing simply to ape the mass media. It's a non-critical reiteration of that desire-producing industry. It completely bores the shit out of me."

In the mid- to late 1980s, this act of distancing was directed at the pop-conceptualist trends of appropriation art and simulationism that were then very much in fashion with the NYC artworld. By Kelley's reckoning, these modes of art-making were still too enamored or problematically intertwined with the consumer culture that they purported to critique, and were therefore complicit in its reperpetuation. His decision to use dolls and rugs was an effort to sidestep this realm of commodified exchange value, drawing instead from the interpersonal economy of gift-giving.

Sure, these dolls, stuffed animals, and the like are the sorts of gifts are commonly outgrown and eventually are left behind or fall by the wayside, yet the ritual of gift-giving is in itself part of formative experiences that shape an individual's psyche, playing a role on the socialization process and thereby having effects that they will carry with them in different interpersonal relation throughout life. This "economy of emotion," as Kelley referred to it, translates into a different form of exchange value -- an exchange value just as often predicated on guilt, obligation and indedtedness, and emotional blackmail or manipulation as it is on love or affection. The slightly dirty and frayed nature of the knit dolls suggests elements of dysfunctionalism that may lie at the heart of familial relationships, with the re-presentation of these items being offered as fetishistic objects -- marginal material embodiments of emotional scarring and trauma. Be that as it may, the associative qualities of these items and materials were bound to cause semantic slippage or prompt more than a single reading.

Just as Mike Kelley's early work reacting against elements of formalism or conceptualism that had been in institutional vogue during years of his own art-school training, his output from the late '80s onward was frequently a response to the ideas that critics had previously attached to his work. But when a number of critics assumed that the work was rooted in Kelley's own personal experiences and that they chose to interpret it in terms of abuse and childhood trauma both baffled and annoyed him. Inasmuch as any of Kelley's later work hinged on themes of abuse and trauma, it was a generalized response to the critical readings that had been grafted onto prior pieces. "I decided that if they say my work is about abuse," he later stated in an interview, "Then I'm going to make my work about abuse -- everyone's abuse." With that, Kelley delved into researching the "culture of victimhood" -- especially the then-popular public mania that involved a swirl of lurid news stories about Repressed Memory Syndrome and satanic ritual abuse. ¹

His other response was to return to writing, producing extensive texts that framed the thematic focus and intention of each new series of work. Making his purpose clearer, hoping to preemptively trump the role that critical interpretations played in "speaking for the artist."

* * * *

Above: Mobile Homestead (Detroit, 2010), Brown is the Color of
My True Love's Soul (1992), Proposal for the Decoration of Conference
Rooms for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry (1991)

"In my estimation, architecture is one of the lowest art forms because it's so utterly bound to taste, functionality, and the necessity to represent -- in the most overt way -- the power of the organizations that pays for it. ...A tremendous amount of money is spent to produce pompous, generally aesthetically empty, structures. And what are these buildings? Often they're associated with those organizations that control and mold your life: churches, schools, government buildings, corporate offices. The decision by al-Qaeda terrorists to destroy the World Trade Center reveals the incredible symbolic meaning attached to these buildings.

Equal to, or surpassing, the symbolic power of official architecture is that of domestic space, which I also find to be reprehensible. I recall that when I read Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space I was shocked by his interpretations of the poetics of domestic space -- his reading of the secret cubbyholes of the home as positively intimate. How different this is to the contemporary trend to see all secret niches as symbolic of hidden trauma. It is beautifully written but, still, it seems like a sophisticated version of a Reader's Digest story. I grew up in an environment in which such literature -- the propagandistic stories of hearth and home found in Reader's Digest and the magazine geared toward geriatric readers at the doctor's office -- was omnipresent. Such stories revel is depictions of phony country domesticity that never was. And even stranger, it is a past that the reader could not have actually lived because it was before their time. It was a false nostalgia."
-- Mike Kelley, interview, 2009

* * * *

In his 1996 book The Return of the Real, Hal Foster devotes a chapter to unpacking the 1980s art trends of appropriation art and simulationism, discussing the work of artists like Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach and Ashley Bickerton in the context how these trends epitomized an era-specific "cynical reason" and a "mortification of critique" in relation to the art market and the broader political economy. Turning his attention to the art of the early 1990s and writing in the immediate wake of Kelley's breakthrough, Foster posits the artist's work as both an example of "abject" and "Generation X" art. For the better part, Foster's reading doesn't much differ from the common account of the time, but in the course of his discussion he brings this musing to the table:

"Lumpen, the German word for 'rag' that gives us Lumpensammler (the ragpicker that so interested Baudelaire) and Lumpenproletariat (the mass too ragged to form a calls of its own that so fascinated Marx -- 'the scum, the leavings, the refuse of all classes') is a crucial word in the Kelley lexicon, which he develops as a third term, like the obscene, between the informe and the abject. In a sense he does what Bataille urges: he thinks materialism through 'psychological or social facts.' The result is an art of lumpen forms (dingy toy animals stitched together in ugly masses, dirty throw rugs laid over nasty shapes), lumpen subjects (pictures of dirt and trash), and lumpen personae (dysfunctional men that build weird devices ordered from obscure catalogues in basements and backyards). Most of these things resist formal shaping, let alone cultural sublimating or social redeeming. Insofar as it has a social referent then, the Lumpen of Kelley...resists molding, much less mobilizing. But does that indifference constitute a politics?"²

Whether or not it constitutes a politics of any sort (coherent, implicit, or otherwise) is a matter for another discussion. The peculiar thing for me -- looking back years later -- is that the work ever received the amount of attention that it did in the first place, that Kelley was so quickly catapulted into the contemporary canon of Significant Art. Aesthetically, it's a bit of an anomaly. In terms of both style and content, it doesn't align with the sleekly designed, po-mo work that flanks in on either side of the artworld continuum -- all of the stuff that Kelley said bored the shit out of him, from the work that rose to the fashionable fore in the mid to late 1980s, which returned in the mid-90s after a brief hiatus, and which has been the dominant style ever since. Perhaps it was all a matter of auspicious timing; with the art bubble of the 1980s having burst at the end of the 1980s, with critics and audiences turning their back on almost everything that had just transpired -- its inflated hype, the market-jockeying cynicism and the unprecedented piles of cash that greased the whole machine -- and instead (perhaps) looking for something that embodied a different sensibility. Something that in no way reflected the sensibility of the prior dubious decade; something that stylistically embodied its exact opposite.

In short, for me Mike Kelley's work -- as it was at a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- didn't resemble much of the American art of its day. And some of Foster's description of the lumpen aspects of his work point towards certain peculiar qualities that bring other comparisons to mind. It's these qualities that instead make me think of installation work by certain Russian "post-conceptual" of the same period -- particularly that of Vadim Zakharov, the husband-and-wife team of Ludmilla Skripkina and Oleg Petrenko, or the collaborative trio Medical Hermeneutics. The use of hand-crafted and slightly worn or ramshackle elements; the way that certain installations inhabit the exhibition space (whether filling it, or at other times sparsely underutilizing it); the use of text, graphics, banners, especially those that involve personal or subaltern sloganeering that apes the rhetoric (syntactical or visual) of the dominant society; and the way these elements often amounted to an eccentric iconography that pointed towards the mythic, the personal, or the pseudoscientific; thereby suggesting a profusion of marginalized counternarratives that run against the grain of the "official" culture and its normative miens.

* * * *

Unsurprising that Kelley bristled against much of what had written about his art, that he chose to react against it throughout part of his career. I have difficulty remembering anything written about Kelley's work that didn't, at the time, strike me as woefully insufficient in many respects. Just as often, I found it to be genuinely awful on some level or another. Especially so for those discussions that hung their analysis on the thematic peg of "low" or "trash" (or, worse yet, "White Trash") culture, usually in reference to failure and elements of the pathetic. Yeahyeahyeah, the tiresome voice of the conflicted, schizoid subconscious of the American middle class; with its many lingering and unexamined puritanical impulses, not to mention the cycles of self-loathing and -castigation fueled by these same impulses. Chronically unreflexive and lacking self-awareness, the middle class continually displaces and projects -- inscribes, if you will -- many of its own neuroses, phobias, and fantasies onto the varied "others" who inhabit lower socio-economic orders. It's this insidious undertow that I've often sensed lurking at the heart of a lot of things that were written about Kelley's work; which is probably why it has invariably came across as being derogatory -- no matter how much the author might've thought or intended otherwise. In this sort of context, the issue of failure seems like such a double-edged topic in this context.³

* * * *

When Mike Kelley decided to make a series of artworks about "everyone's abuse," he delved into researching the topic from various angles, part of which led him to concentrate of Repressed Memory Syndrome, which was something of a public mania at the time due to its connection with reputed (and eventually discredited) incidents of satanic ritual abuse. This same research also steered Kelley into the domain of ufology. This last aspect wasn't entirely new territory for the Kelley, who described the topic of UFOs as having been a "major cultural fixation" of his childhood. Add to this that Kelley had been 12 years old and living in the Detroit suburbs when a rash of UFO sightings occurred throughout southeast Michigan; sightings that made national newspapers and prompted then-Michigan senator Gerald Ford to call for a Congressional inquiry.

Kelley said he was intrigued with tracking the way ufology reports changed over the years -- beginning with the sharp increase of sightings during the depths of the Cold War in the 1950s and '60s up to more contemporary reports of close encounters and abductions, and how such stuff was reflected in popular science-fiction forms. Whereas once upon a time, he noted, aliens were sometimes portrayed as benevolent, in the post-Whitley Strieber era they were almost always portrayed as a menace -- particularly with the universal frequency with which probing factored into recent accounts. Inasmuch as these accounts played out as a low-level cultural obsession, Kelley regarded them as a convergence of "hi-tech fetishism and body loathing" in which extraterrestrials assume the role of "childlike abusers of adults." As such, he saw them as being part of a broader "culture of victimhood" – the pop-psychology trend that argued that the dynamics of a person's adult life were anchored in some form of childhood trauma.

* * * *

"But [curator Emi] Fontana, who saw Kelley last week for dinner, said that Kelley's art-world accomplishments had a price, as he had been actively struggling with what it means to succeed in a world that has become more materialistic and foreign to him.

'He had a deep discomfort in seeing what the art world is now,' Fontana said. 'He didn't like the fact that everything has become so corporate. He said to me: If I were to start now, I would never become a visual artist.

'He really wanted to be an important artist, and he worked all of his life for that. He found himself at the top of his game and then found that the world he was at the top of was a world that he didn't like. That's intense existentially.'"
-- from the L.A. Times obit, 02/02/2012

* * * *

II: John P

This work says as much about John's teacher as it does about John. The painting is obviously the by-product of a school holiday assignment. Assigning holiday subject matter in art classes is not suggested. A weak student, such as this, seeks to please his master by hiding behind a mask of compliance. The result is anti-art on the aesthetic level, and hypocrisy on the moral level. This student has an uncanny ability to produce stereotypical art geared towards such occasions as Christmas, Easter, birthdays, and so on. He produces an art that is of an exceptionally ugly, saccharine vulgarity. This weak child's facile performance bolsters his self-esteem, and could lead eventually to a career in an intensely socialized field such as commercial art, but at what cost? In producing work meant to please his teacher, this child has become emotionally and aesthetically stunted. A jack-o-lantern is three-year-old subject matter, and John should have moved beyond this kind of imagery long ago. There is a definite problem when older students continue to produce only bland and conventional art works. John's teacher's preference for stereotypical art could be a sign that he is warding off dangerous negative fantasies himself, a supposition supported by his preference for Halloween assignments, which focus on antisocial imagery and depictions of death. The obvious intent is to produce a flattened emotional climate in the class room. The purposeful arrangement of this kind of pseudo-art is a defensive maneuver on the part of the teacher, who does not have the strength to confront his student's mutilated and distorted personalities. This inability on the part of the teacher to respond to his student's distress results in the creation of a consciousness hostile to understanding. A lack of true response in interpersonal relationships creates a world view that is divested of meaning. This is experienced by the child as a 'nameless dread,' which explains the child's attraction to conventionalized images of horror, like ghosts. The clichéd expression of the terrible masks the true terror of actual interior emptiness.

-- extract from We Communicate Only Through Our
Shared Dismissal of the Prelinguistic (1995)

* * * *

In the last dozen or so years of his life, Mike Kelley devoted most his time to concentrating on a single project -- an open-ended, multi-part and multi-media project titled Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction. Involving video productions, performance and "total" installation settings. Each production was drawn from an archive Kelley had been amassing over the years; a collection of photos taken mostly from high-school yearbooks, photos of random depictions of school plays and peripheral ceremonies -- amateur theatrical efforts and pageantry, rites of initiation, and what Kelley described as "the carnivalesque" – the sorts of activities that commonly take place in the context of high school, yet fall just on the periphery of its institutional program.From these varied and random photos he'd derive elaborate narratives for each production.

By dent of his own Catholic upbringing, Kelley was fascinated with ritual and its role in culture, and the EAPR served as a vehicle for dissecting the role of ritual in the processes of socialization in the years of pre-adulthood, exploring inclusive and exclusionary modes of behavior through which social groups and strata align. "One of the reasons I initially wanted to become an artist was to produce secular rituals," He once explained in an interview. "I've always thought of art as secular ritual, as material ritual. For me art sometimes functions as social critique or social analysis, but at other times I'm simply playing with the forms of ritual as pure form."

* * * *

The artist conducting field research (c. 1959),
and Catholic Birdhouse (1978)

As for myself, I came to Mike Kelley's work a bit late. I remember when he had his big breakthrough in the early nineties, but at the time it failed to engage my interest for some of the reasons I've complained about above -- seeing the same handful of works reproduced time and again, each time discussed in the same dubious terms, I didn't see much there there. Any appreciation I developed for his art came slowly and sporadically. Partly this was prompted by subsequent exposure to much of his work that had received little critical attention, the sort of stuff that exhibited an underlying sense of darkly sardonic humor that appealed to me, that invoked a sense of recognition or kinship. There was also hearing the music of Destroy All Monsters after Kelley and Jim Shaw revived the original version of the outfit in the early nineties after their 18-year absence. And then there were also the interviews with him that I randomly encountered over the years, in which he said a lot of things I could identify with, and that helped give me a clearer sense of where he and his work were "coming from." On a certain level, there was something about the germinating ideas and the direction that Kelley took that I could identify with; and I eventually found that his was the sort of voice – in its specific critical stance toward the broader culture -- that I thought had been overwhelmingly absent from most institutionally-recognized art of the past few decades. That voice has now gone silent, by all accounts by way of deliberately silencing itself. In one or another, it was inevitable one way or another, since Kelley had claimed in a recent interview that he thinking about dropping out of the artworld, anyway -- that he might be planning to stop making art.

For some perverse, utterly random reason I find myself reaching for Antonin Artaud's frothing screed "Van Gogh, The Man Suicided by Society," which I probably last read when I was in my late teens some 25 years ago. It comes to mind only because of its feverish (and very French) romanticism, as Artaud expulsed about the relativity of madness in the face of a society syphilitic with its own advanced pathologies and "bourgeois inertia." The essay's romanticism is that of another era, one that's utterly alien and inaccessible to our own. It's the sort of thing that can (most likely) only be read these days through a thick lens of irony. But isn't irony the essence of our current age, particularly those of us (myself, and Kelley himself) whose date of birth landed them on this side of the "postmodern" divide?

And there's no shortage of irony in the topic at hand. Perhaps starting with: The irony of someone who was raised Catholic opting to snuff himself; or an artist who set out to be failure and thought his pursuits would guarantee him a desired marginal existence instead meeting with unexpected success. Or of creating work that spoke from the margins and was intended to be abject and irredeemable, and then -- eventually -- finding that the conditions of that same work's acceptance led to an irredeemable situation. Of being alienated from the reasons that one a particular pursuit in the first place, only to find that all the bullshit you'd tried to circumnavigate loomed out of the waters and swallowed you whole. "Something done in bad faith can be successful," perhaps; but the nature of that success might demand some kind of merciless toll in return. Better to go with the tide of cynical reason, some might conclude, but all the while enviably admiring the efforts of those who choose to swim against it.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

endnotes

1. Admittedly, Kelley's 1990 piece "Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood" -- with its explicit depiction of what amount to a form of plushie sex -- sealed the envelope on this fetishistic/psycho-sexual reading of this body of work.

2. A distinction to be made at this point: Foster's use of the abject in relation to Kelley privileges Bataille's original use of the term, which was social in its orientation. The use of the term in the artworld of the early-mid 1990s was derived from Julia Kristeva, whose concept of abjection were largely based in Lacanian psychoanalytic theories.

3. Mike Kelley had stated in interviews that he disliked the designative terms of "high" and "low" in this context, and that his use of certain objects and materials was because of what he considered their "generic" qualities.

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes

2012-02-13T22:57:00.001-05:00

Seemed like a pretty pressing concern once upon a. But what the fuck did I know, I was only in high school at the time.

Eyes in the Heat

2012-02-10T12:08:00.000-05:00

Mood-altering earworms of the week in these parts.

And yeah, I'm aware that content's been scarce and slight here lately. For which I can only blame a number of distractions, sidetrackings, etc. Hopefully things'll be back on the rails shortly.

The Nineties Revival

2012-02-07T00:10:00.002-05:00

...I guess it's going to fully kick in one day. Eventually. And when it finally does, it ain't gonna be pretty.*

* But hey, the Eighties revival still shows no signs of fucking off anytime soon, so maybe there's no need to worry.

Because

2012-02-01T20:16:00.001-05:00

And yet the feeling of arrival never wanes upon departure, and vice versa, so the two coalesce and become less than one

2012-01-28T16:35:00.008-05:00

"Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have condemned ourselves to a lifelong immersion in the arbitrary...LAX: welcoming -- possibly flesh-eating -- orchids at the check-in counter...'Identity' is the new junk food for the dispossessed, globalization's fodder for the disenfranchised ...."

"...the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory..."

"Continuity is the essence of Junkspace: it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness..."

"Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystification."

"...Junkspace is the body double of space, a territory of impaired vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness, ...a Bermuda Triangle of concepts... it cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses intention with realization. It replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition."

"A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed. ...welcoming an infinity of virtual populations to nonexistent theres."

"Junkspace is a domain of feigned, simulated order, ... flamboyant yet unmemorable,..."

"Murals used to show idols; Junkspace's moduless are dimensioned to carry brands; myths can be shared, brands husband auras at the mercy of focus groups. Brands in Junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: they are essences through which meaning disappears..."

"There is no form, only proliferation ... Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish, and embrace manipulation..."

"Junkspace sheds architectures like a reptile sheds skins, is reborn every Monday morning. ... At the exact moment that our culture has abandoned repetition and regularity as repressive, building materials have become more and more modular, unitary, and standardized .... Instead of developement, it offers entropy. ...Change has become divorced from the idea of improvement. There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture staggers endlessly sideways..."

"Traditionally, typology implies demarcation, the definition of a singular model that excludes other arrangements. Junkspace represents a reverse typology of cumulative, approximative identity, less about kind than about quantity. ..."

"Like radioactive waste, Junkspace has an insidious half-life. Aging in Junkspace is nonexistent or catastrophic; sometimes an entire Junkspace -- a department store, a nightclub, a bachelor pad -- turns into a slum overnight without warning: wattage diminishes imperceptibly, letters drop out of signs, air-conditioning units start dripping, cracks appear as if from otherwise unregistered earthquakes; sections rot, are no longer viable,..."

"Fascism without dictator. From the sudden dead end where you have been dropped by a monumental, granite staircase, an escalator takes you to an invisible destination, facing a provisional vista made of plaster, inspired by forgettable sources. ...Toilet groups mutate into Disney Stores then morph to become meditation centers: Successive transformations mock the word 'plan.'"

"...Can the bland be amplified? The featureless be exaggerated?..."

"JunkSignature™ is the new architecture: the former megalomania of a profession contracted to manageable size, Junkspace minus its saving vulgarity."

"Half of mankind pollutes to produce, the other half pollutes to consume."

"Comfort is the new justice."

"Not exactly 'anything goes'; in fact, the secret of Junkspace is that it is both promiscuous and repressive; as the formless proliferates, the formal withers, and with it all rules, regulations, recourse..."

"Through Junkspace, old aura is transfused with new luster to spawn sudden commercial viability: Barcelona amalgamated with the Olympics, Bilbao with the Guggenheim, Forty-Second Street with Disney. God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing...an insulting evolutionary joke..."

"Junkspace reduces what is urban to urbanity...Instead of public life, Public Space™: what remains of the city once the unpredictable has been removed..."

"In the past, the complexities of Junkspace were compensated for by the stark rawness of its adjunct infrastructures: parking garages, filling stations, distribution centers routinely displaying a monumental purity that was the original sin of modernism. Now, massive injections of lyricism have enabled an infrastructure -- the one domain previously immune to design, taste, the marketplace -- to join the world of Junkspace, and for Junkspace to extend its manifestations under the sky."

"Deprivation can be caused by overdose or shortage; both conditions happen in Junkspace (often at the same time). ...[The stylistic minimum] does not signify beauty, but guilt. ...Ostensibly a relief from constant sensorial onslaught, minimum is maximum in drag, a stealth laundering of luxury: the stricter the lines, the more irresistible the seduction. Its role is not to approximate the sublime, but to minimize the shame of consumption, drain embarrassment, to lower what is higher. The minimum now exists in a state of parasitic codependency with the overdose: to have and not to have, craving and owning, finally collapsed into a single signifier..."

"Museums are sanctimonious Junkspace;...Monasteries inflated to the scale of department stores; expansion is the Third Millennium's entropy, dilute or die."

"We used to renew what was depleted, now we resurrect what is gone."

-- Rem Koolhaas, "Junkspace" (selected excerpts)

The subject, thumbing through the pages of his own effacement

2012-01-27T10:21:00.007-05:00

Or: Post-Fordist Rubbernecking as Surrealist Slapstick

All that stone and concrete patinaed with age, the windows empty or broken or gaping, the random graffiti and intrusions of natural reclamation. The remnants, how they loom. No figures in the landscape. Ah, but if those walls could talk, what might they have to impart?

But chances are that by now you might be bored with ruins. I have been for a good while. They've kind of everywhere these days. More of the same, shruggingly navigate away. Pictures of them, anyway -- all over the web, in coffee table books, etc. And yes, I've blogged about them before; did so very recently in fact. A cultural meme/trend that's been going for several years; which isn't as ubiquitous as all the zombie bullshit and the proliferation of various eschatological scenarios in books and films that've also been quite popular for a while now. The appeal of which makes one wonder about the nature or source of that appeal; which for me has long been the main aspect of the ruins/Detroit meme that I have found intriguing. Intriguing, because there's been so little commentary or analysis accompanying it. Or I suppose there has been, but none of it amounting to anything substantial – not much aiming to get beneath the surface of the allure of so-called ruin porn.

These misgivings of mine being something I tried to address when writing about this topic a while back. The obvious point being that the current allure of ruins being something quite different from that of more Romantic times; because in the previous era that appeal came down to a sublime awe for the remnants of antiquity, whereas today it's a matter of aestheticizing the decaying foundations of the present society. And that latter aspect, I've long suspected, has a lot to do – consciously or not – with the recent proliferation of images, photog projects, magazine spreads, books, and etcetera. Yet the discourse that has accompanied all of it has been either scant or anemic, if not both. And that absence begs any number of questions.

But this is more like it. The '"this" being a piece in the winter edition of the Glasgow-based arts publication Variant, submitted by contributor John Cunningham, entitled "Boredom in the Charnel House: Theses on 'Post-Industrial' Ruins." Of Marchand and Meffre's photography book The Ruins of Detroit, Cunningham at one point observes:

"There’s a sense in that [the photos] reproduce the viewing subject as a consumer of dereliction, the images mediating the ruin as a theme park to be drifted through. A certain distance is necessary to enjoy the accumulation of debris since who would want to live in a ruin? Images of the contemporary ruinscape present the aestheticisation of the destruction of the world in much the same way that 20th century avant gardes such as the Futurists enjoyed the bluster of warfare. Except what is lacking in these images of our dereliction is the passion and joy that animated the parodic virility of the Futurists. Aestheticised might be better read as anaesthetised affect since The Ruins of Detroit for all the wide screen flourish and detail of the images gives me the sense that all of this has simply been curated for the sake of distraction and gazing – or perhaps grazing – upon the ruins. The lack of affect present in such acts of curation is even more accentuated in the repetition of the curating impulse on the web."

As the title proposes, Cunningham offers six possible theses for framing "ruin porn" in various discursive contexts, six possible means of unpacking the pop-cult fixation at hand. He perhaps gets closest to my original thoughts on the matter with his third thesis, "Ruined Passivity"...

"This process of the subjectification of a passive, neutralised subject might seem too much to read from the diffusion of images of dereliction but the theme park or art space is also immanent to the contemporary ruin. For instance, photographer and ruin auteur Camilo José Vergara proposed with a kind of blank irony that the ruinscape of Detroit be preserved as a museum of US capitalism. It’s worth noting that in Germany the industrial detritus of the Rurhr valley and the mining areas of the ex-Stalinist Eastern part of the country have already been transformed into such a museum of Fordism. In an essay upon this, Kirstin Barndt goes so far to write of a 'transformation of the subject' from worker to leisured (or unemployed) consumer and a 'new landscape of affect' produced through the aestheticisation of dereliction and its preservation as a post-industrial playpen with walkways, art galleries and perfectly preserved ruins. [...] And what might be termed affective subjects are partially produced through such spaces. As Ganser, the project director of one of the 'post' industrial theme parks in Germany comments: 'People feel better, even though objectively the economic situation remains unchanged'. This can also be shaped as configuring nostalgia in the shape of mourning for the past, a past where the local population was not quite as surplus to the requirements of capital. 'People feel better' is as good a motto as any for the disciplinary apparatuses of contemporary capitalism."

I'd recommend the .pdf version, as it's better formatted and includes the illustrations that Cunningham refers to at various points in the essay (whereas the poorly-set 'text' version doesn't).

* * * *

From ruins to wreckage...

"Even with our little lapses, we generally intend the best. We reason, calculate, tabulate. We conspire. We watch our backs, and we sometimes have the backs of others. And yet we stagger forward across seas on which oil from a busted well below is burned. We build reactors, and they are upset when we barricade the railroads that carry away their waste. We make dolls that chew the scalps of little girls. We bury waste in a too-shallow grave and now you can’t eat the cheese. We throw away pairs of shoes and books, and we make more of them, and we don’t burn the ones that should be burned. We starve or are starved. We are surprised that rocks exist."

Evan Calder Williams, currently residing & researching in Napoli, momentarily breaks his blogging hiatus to offer a spiel on a certain recent event. As usual for when he lays forth in long form, it's a corker.

After Nature

2012-01-25T17:22:00.004-05:00

"Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fire still spreads."
-- W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

A seasonal mix. The discoloration of memory, weatherings, the passage of time and the tain of the mirror, deliberately degraded audio, with some oblique passing nods to Satie, Schubert, and Tarkovsky...

~~Soundcloud~~ streaming version now disabled. Download still available here here for a limited time.

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Oxford Modern

2012-01-21T10:24:00.000-05:00

A collection of exhibition posters from the Modern Art Oxford gallery, gathered for the 50:50 program this past autumn. Full selection and info here.

via Socks Studio.

Some Last Words on 'Collage Culture'

2012-01-20T10:34:00.002-05:00

Not mine, but someone else's. Uncannily paralleling some ideas from the Aaron Rose essay I was talking about earlier...

Q: How long did this new sonic aesthetic take to come together? And was there a particular trigger that inspired the shift?

JF: I was drinking a V-SMOOTHIE, in West Hollywood, at this place called Earth Bar. The ambience was like cold, moist air-conditioned Eco-space, digital ringtones tweeting off, smoothie blenders, laptops. And then a blue-haired man walked up to the counter in his five-finger shoes, texting on his Blackberry. The space felt so online. I was in a diverse online rain forest of $60 eco-smoothies and flat screen TV menus. I just wanted to make music that sounded like this, something these people could blast on their iPods. The ideas got deeper then this later, but this was the initial starting point.

Q: So how much of an inspiration has the internet and the digital world been on [the Far Side Virtual album]?

JF: The Internet is dispatching everything in our globalised mega-city. People are essentially wearing the Internet, eating it, hearing it, talking about it all the time, because everything is like a symptom of an Internet driven society. It's really obvious, though it's not the main attraction in FSV's story. FSV is a still life. Everybody's music sounds like the Internet right now, from Top 40 to underground. Fashion looks like the Internet. It's this weird impressionism that everything embodies. I think there will be more and more artwork resembling this. Digital clarity has given us another perspective on humanism.

Q: Do you think it's possible to avoid making art that doesn't reflect the intenseness of the internet's involvement in modern society?

JF: If by chance somebody does achieve this they are truly avant garde.

James Ferraro, interview in The Quietus, Dec., 2011.

Medium Cool

2012-01-18T14:53:00.004-05:00

For a the past couple of decades -- up until quite recently, really -- a good number of my friends and acquaintances have been younger than myself; usually by a full decade, sometimes more. Naturally, I long ago noticed the differences across those ages, about how we each respectively viewed the world, our perspectives having been shaped by the different circumstances of our "formative years." My own youth having well pre-dated the internet, with VCRs and cable TV only fully entering the picture by roughly about the time I started high school. They on the other hand grew up in a culture that was awash -- flooded, morelike -- with a variety of media. And baring out the sociological stats that we've been hearing for some years now, I often noted the evidence that they were also the product of a generation that was aggressively, incessantly marketed to.

Not that my exposure to TV was limited when I was young -- far from it. But we never had more than one TV set at a time, and I don't think we owned a color TV until I was about 10 or 11 years old. As far as having the thing on in the background was concerned, turn it off if you're not really watching it -- you're running up the power bill. Which made sense at the time, not only because we were always broke, but because it was late '70s and thanks to the energy crisis everyone was being admonished to conserve energy by whatever means possible.

I only mention this in relation to a fine pair of posts that Carl has up'd over at the group-effort decades blogs. I'm impressed at how astutely he describes and sizes up the media landscape(s) of the era in question -- its transformation in relation to the broader culture. In hindsight, not too many years after the fact, I could look back and recognize the nature of these cultural shifts; but of course when you're younger and living in the midst of it all, it isn't the sort of stuff you give much thought to, on account of it merely being the way things are, and one's own lack of a frame of reference at that time in one's life.

At the '70s blog, a very sharp conflating of two very significant movies of the time, Network and Being There, and the role that television itself plays in each film...

"Chauncey isn't exactly a parody of Reagan but of a whole tendency toward the idea of the natural man; whose power is precisely his uncluttered, uninflected apprehension of direct truths that the more sophisticated can never attain, dogged as they are by psychological and existential problems, their optimism ruined by experience. This lionization of the homespun, the good plain sense of a true American spirit uncorrupted by doubt and fancy European book-learning will reach its peak/nadir with Forest Gump. TV is the soul of America made visible and Chauncey is its word made flesh. This is why in the final sequence as the Elders discuss his candidature for president we see him guilelessly walk on water, he is superhuman, a redeemer, has a direct unmediated access to the Oversoul, incarnates it. Diana in Network may be 'TV incarnate' for Chayefsky (indifferent to suffering and love alike, the phallic witch of the coldest of all cold mediums) but Chauncey incarnates TV as salvation, and what he will save is Capitalism." *

From there, Carl continues at the '80s blog, transplanting the theme of deregulation as it occurs in Being There and applies it to the emergent cable-TV market of the 1980s; more specifically to the boom in youth-demographic target marketing that came with that emergence. In the course of which, he makes the following aside:

"From the perspective of 2012 and the waves of nostalgic music that hark back to the 80s and portray it as a world of colour and fun, there is a pre-Lapsarian longing for a restoration not just of the loss of childhood but also a point in which media specifically intended to divert and engage with children of virtually every age were in abundance. The often low-fi and misty evocations of the past, the primary colours, simple shapes and themes seem to replay the very early experience of nebulous but scientifically honed and crafted eye- and attention-grabbing ads and products for very young children. This is also a kind of 'cathode pastoralism' in which a later generation looks back in longing at the pre-internet age of analogue TV and shiny, solid objects in the way early denizens of modernity perhaps idealized the rural and artisanal past."

Impressive too is the accuracy of the description of the U.S. mediascape in particular, considering that Carl's writing about it from other shores. Curious about the rest of the "work in progress."

Speaking of "other shores," I couldn't help but be amused by this recent post from another contributor.

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* Admittedly, the ending of Being There is an ambiguous one; the sort that prompts a variety of readings. One could argue that the "Elders"/pallbearers in the funeral scene speak in a way that casts them as (more pointedly) behind-the-curtain manipulators -- members of a partisan cabal who shrewdly and cynically view Gardner as little more than a malleable agent (a stooge, effectively) for retaining their own power. The fact that they're carrying Rand's casket to a mausoleum that can only be characterized as distinctly Masonic in style supports this conspiratorial reading.

The Location of Culture: Scattered and Increasingly Digressive Notes About 'Collage Culture', Pt. II

2012-01-16T17:36:00.024-05:00

Asco - Día de los Muertos Takeover, East L.A. 1974

In his essay "The Death of Subculture," Aaron Rose relates a comment made to him by Glenn O'Brien, who had remarked, "Subculture is no substitute for culture." Naturally, because the former always evolves and formulates values and identity by way of its inverse relationship to the dominance of the latter. This putting me in mind of Koolhaas's topography of the Generic City:

"Identity centralizes; it insists on an essence, a point. ...As the sphere of influence expands, the area characterized by the center becomes larger and larger, hopelessly diluting both the strength and the authority of the core; inevitably the distance between center and circumference increases to the breaking point. In this perspective, the recent, belated discovery of the periphery as a zone of potential value – a kind of pre-historical condition that might finally be worthy of architectural attention – is only a disguised insistence on the priority of and dependency on the center: without center, no periphery: the interest of the first presumably compensates for the emptiness of the latter. ...The last vibes emanating from the exhausted center preclude the reading of the periphery as a critical mass. Not only is the center by definition too small to perform its assigned obligations, it is also no longer the real center but an overblown mirage on its way to implosion; yet its illusory presence denies the rest of the city its legitimacy."

* * * *

Two quite common, if not slightly clichéd, readings of the work of Alberto Burri...

The first is the materialist angle, concentrating on Burri's use of materials evocative of the landscape of a war-torn Europe -- the "sackcloth and ashes" of his earlier work being reflective of a society digging itself out from the rubble and the burden of a troubled modern history, with the later works using industrial-grade plastics and the like paralleling Italy's recovery thanks to the largesse of the Marshall Plan (if not of the short-lived economic miracolo italiano of the late 1950s and early '60s).

The other being the one that stresses the visceral associations bound up with many of Burri's works. An account anchored in the biographic, that cites his former service as a medic in the Italian military during WWII; and how that experience proved too much for him, causing him to turn his back on a medical career, only to take up painting shortly after war's end. The tears and cuts and stitching and scorchings that appear throughout his works calling to mind fleshly wounds, lacerations, bandagings, suturing and cauterizations.

Both readings being highly metaphorical, each being rooted in a different site of trauma -- the first socio-historic in character, the latter psychological.

* * * *

Alberto Burri's work gained almost immediate attention in the late 1940s; especially in New York, where a young Robert Rauschenberg quickly fell under its influence. By 1952, Rauschenberg traveled to Italy with Cy Twombly, the former with the intent of seeking out Burri in Rome. That artists like Rauschenberg and Twombly would come into the mature phase of their careers by way of European influence proves intriguing, partly because it flies in the face of certain critical accounts of art history in the second half of the twentieth century -- the common version that has it that American art during those years having been a scenario of self-invention and willful pioneering, taking no cues from a European scene whose Modernist momentum had faltered due to the disruption of WWII, and whose postwar artistic developments constituted lateral or idiosyncratic zags that failed to resonate in a broader international context.

By some accounts, the European postwar art informel movement was interpreted as a response to the historical plight of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century -- an expression of cultural and existential malaise, arising out of smoldering doubts about the metaphysical health of Western civilization that had resulted in two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the Holocaust.¹, ² The disparity between historical circumstances makes for an ironic contrast -- Burri and his contemporaries laboring in postwar Europe, engaging modern material culture in a tentative and ambivalent manner; Rauschenberg (and his contemporaries working in the more overtly "Pop" vein) working in a postwar American climate of emerging affluence and triumphant complacency.

* * * *

While poking through my bookshelves looking for what various critics have said on the history of collage, I come across Francis Frascina's "Realism and Ideology: An Introduction to Semiotics and Cubism" in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction – The Early Twentieth Century. Frascina addresses the anti-Symbolist impulse at work in the Cubist collages of Picasso; most pointedly in the incorporation of newsprint as indicative of Picasso's bristling against certain ideas promoted by Stéphane Mallarmé and his neo-Symbolist partisans:

"For Mallarmé and the Symbolists the newspaper was debased literary journalism in contrast to 'the book, ' ...The new poetry, Mallarmé argued, should be the antithesis of the vertical columns of the mass market newspaper: the overall effect of such poetry would be based on the aural and optical effects of words in 'pure,' formal relationships. As [art historian Christine] Poggi points out, Mallarmé's ideas were prevalent among Symbolist poets, artists and critics who shared his aspiration to create an 'autonomous art free of all reality.'"

Elsewhere, Frascina addresses Picasso and Braque's place with the "subculture of the avant garde" of the bohemian enclaves of Paris circa 1912. Moreover, Frascina argues that -- with Picasso being a grubby immigrant Spaniard in the works, Braque of rural peasant origins, and both working in a radically new and esoteric artistic direction -- the two artists constituted something of a "subculture within a subculture." In terms of how this manifests itself in Cubist collage and the artist's semiotic manipulation of the mass-produced matériel of Parisian culture:

"Generally subcultures maintain relations with the shared public sign systems of society that are different from those of mainstream groups; this characteristic illuminates Picasso and Braque's 'play' with signs. The social experience of members of a subculture is typically contradictory; they are resistant to but dependant on a social system which [sic] they find inhospitable. In relation to available sign systems, subcultures generally 'play games' with them, breaking their rules in various ways. Much of the time, all that results is a rapid turnover of minority group styles: the music of youth subculture, for example 'punk' in the late 1970s, is typical of 'semiotic play.' Often marginalized as socially eccentric, such styles are essentially defensive of the group's identity. Sometimes, however, the merely defensive is transformed into an active engagement with dominant social groupings. …Symbolic resistance deals with those public signs which come into some relationship with the sub-group's own socio-economic life."

* * * *

Contra Symbolism, #42: Scatology versus Sublimity...

"You want to exhibit gold, I will exhibit shit; you want to pump up the artistic ego with your monochromes and your immateriality, I will put the artist's breath in red balloons that I will burst."

Piero Manzoni, in a reputed taunt to Yves Klein.

* * * *

In his lateral notes on the "Art in the Streets"/Collage Culture topic, Simon cites a quote from the late "Mission School" artist Margaret Kilgallen; a remark from an interview that I'd forgotten, in which she talked about her attraction to vintage sign painting, something to the effect of "all this stuff becomes interesting to me when it's no longer selling anything to me." In this type of instance, we have the case of something being reappropriated from the realm of the commercial and transplanted into that of the aesthetic; and these days it’s a common practice -- the fascination that many artists and designers share for graphic and illustrative styles of prior eras.

Much of which was the product of packaging and advertising, rather than that of "high" art proper – the ceaseless churnings of consumer culture and the surfeit of waste and quickly-jettisoned rubbish it produces as it plows forward with its business. It's of no small significance that Schwitters called his series of collages Merz; the title having been derived from the word Kommerz, the isolated phoneme turning up on a scrap of the street-sweepings that the artist had been sifting through. A descendent of Schwitters's project having been the décollages composed by Jacques Villeglé, Raymond Hains, François Dufrêne, Mimmo Rotella, and Wolf Vostell in the decades immediately following WWII -- treating the layered scraps and peelings of poster bills that lined the city streets as Duchampian "modified readymades" -- raw material for salvage and manipulation. From refuse to re-use.

All these consideration of wounds and wastes eventually playing out on some subconscious level of corporeal metaphorics, pointing in the direction of Bataille and his theorizing about the aesthetics of the abject and the "excremental" in art and material culture. Writing in Formless: A User's Guide, Yves-Alain Bois addresses Bataille's omission of kitsch in his writing on l'informe -- e.g., the kitsch of the "mercenary," "vulgar" products of commercial advertising. This Bois more or less attributes to Batialle's aversion to dialectics; particularly that of the opposition between "high" (art) and "low" (kitsch) elsewhere/later proffered by both Adorno and Clement Greenberg:

"This lack of interest on Bataille's part in the idea of kitsch undoubtedly arose from the position of mastery (irony) and the clear taxonomy that it presupposes and against which it plays. The statue raised to the Cadum baby can only be appreciated ironically: it makes fun of the decorousness of taste and denies that there is an ontological split between the monument (eternal) and advertising (ephemeral); but one can only take ironic pleasure in it if one is confidant in the solidity of one's own taste. One enjoys kitsch only from a distance (nothing is kitsch in itself: for an object to be perceived as kitsch, a distanced, mediated gaze must be directed toward it). In short, kitsch is dialectical: one only has access to it by knowing to the very tips of one's fingers what it attacks, to wit, modernism."³

At another point in the volume, Bois cites the comments of critic Carl Einstein in the Surrealist publication Documents circa 1930, dryly lamenting: "There was a time when collage played the part of the acid thrower, [when it was] a means of defense against the happy chance of virtuosity. Today it has degenerated into easy riddles and is in danger of lapsing into the fakery of petit-bourgeois decoration."

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1. The term art informel is admittedly a hazy and problematic one. Proposed by French critic Michel Tapié in the early 1950s, it quickly became an umbrella term to describe a variety of vaguely similar stylistic mutations in European art during the postwar years. Several artists that Tapié had in mind when devising the term flatly rejected it as having no bearing on the work that they were doing – Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Burri being chiefly among them. In the case of Dubuffet, Burri, and the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies are concerned, the less common designation arte materica might prove more precise.

2. Perhaps it goes without saying that this in some ways constituted a chickens-coming-home scenario in Italy, given that mechanized warfare and fascism were two aspects of modernity vociferously celebrated by the Italian Futurists just a few decades previously.

3. I find that this passage addresses my own dislike for the supposed po-mo "irony" bound up in the art of Jeff Koons. When Claes Oldenburg made soft sculptures of hamburgers and payphones or proposed a huge statue of a teddy bear, it (once-upon-a) amounted to an act of transformatively catapulting the mundane into the realm of the contemplative -- if not a "pop" extension of Dubuffet's program for "rehabilitating dirt." But when Koons effectively recycles the ideas of Oldenburg by producing monuments of Michael Jackson and Bubbles or a giant puppy made of flowers, it can only amount to a misfire, in the process irredeemably reconsigning its subject to the realm of kitsch by way of its own habitual cynicism. Rote, second-hand irony is irony that ultimately nullifies itself out of the equation.

Intertubes Interlude

2012-01-14T21:01:00.003-05:00

Recent weeks: A malady that arrived just in time to Grinchicize the holidays. Returning home to a dead modem and various stressful upheavals. The sleep-dep resulting from the first item on the list accounts for my scarcity of late. I suspect it's also responsible for being a-bit/all emo like a muhfuh'r lately. Such as frequent bouts of homesickness, to which the above can be attributed. Because (goddammit) I haven't had a decent Middle Eastern meal in some 2-plus years, and I miss regular (hell, any) exposure to things like the above. Was present at the first two occasions, saw the others in different settings on other occasions.

Cohran's the odd one. Yeah, "seminal" figure in the whole AACM & "soul jazz" hotbed Chicago southside scene once-upon-a, but for a long while his only regular appearances were playing at an Ethiopian restaurant on the northside -- switching out between a variety of instruments (harp, kalimba, sax, etc.) over a cheezy prerecorded backing.

And I guess there's the matter of missing certain friends that I haven't seen since I vacated on Chi & isht like that.

File under: Pure personal indulgence on my part. (Or the alternate that my friend & associate Pere Lebrun's so fond of: Without music life w/b a joke.)

Raiding the 20th Century: Scattered and Sundry Digressive Notes About 'Collage Culture', Pt. I

2012-01-14T15:47:00.012-05:00

Simon brings an item to my attention, a recent slender volume titled Collage Culture: Examining the 21th Century's Identity Crisis, for which I was grateful, because it had otherwise escaped my notice. The book sports a pair of essays, one being by Aaron Rose, director of the Alleged Art gallery and the man responsible for both the book and documentary Beautiful Losers; with the other being by writer/poet Mandy Kahn. Kahn's "Living in the Mess" is the longer and more enjoyable of the two essays -- a hopscotching, discursive path over & around her own ambivalence about certain aspects of the culture of the past decade. A cultural landscape in which, amidst all the slippage of irony and clutter, a type of semantical entropy results from everything canceling each other out. "THERE IS DANGER IN A LANDSCAPE OF MEANINGLESS SIGNS," she concludes early on.

Rose's contribution, "The Death of Subculture," is another thing entirely, being something of a manifesto or clarion call to young creatives, culture workers, & artists to return to a "total existence of innovation," to ditch habitual plundering and borrowing. At one point he describes the cultural landscape of the first decade of the 21st century as being "a blender devouring the trends of the last century," which prompts him to worry:

"We are in danger of destroying the fundamental and basic foundations of our creative identity. Our culture has come to view the tenets of original thought and creative innovation as an outdated model – but it has yet to release a new version to replace it."

* * * *
In the musical context, what's to blame? Why was the previous decade so largely given over to an orgy of plundering, retreading, recycling, etc? I suppose one could partially blame the whole 'bastard pop'/ mashup trend for giving the whole thing a good bit of its momentum. Or how all the business with "Grey Tuesday" and the Joy Garnett case and whatnot politicized the whole matter of appropriation and "fair use" in the face of the rapidly-inflating realm of "intellectual property" and the corporate copyright police. Or maybe it had something to do with that fucking Rapture album, and with James Murphy and the DFA network, and with all the Brooklyn bands who in the early part of the noughties unanimously decided to resurrect the post-punk sound, thus kicking off a trend of plundering the sounds of the Reagan Era that unflaggingly continues to the present. Or with graffiti art (which traditionally always relied quite heavily on quoting and citing) finally, fully coming into its own via the post-"Mission School" generation of street art. Or with "acid folk"/"New Weird America" and its fascination with the past, creative precedents, the cultural archive. Undoubtedly yes to all of the above, as well as to about a dozen other things that don't immediately leap to mind.

* * * *
A question that's nagged me for a while: With all this recently enabled access to the cultural archive, if indeed it's now "everything time," why aren't things (then?) more eclectic? Seems that there's long been a tendency to return to one specific period (to one aspect of its look or its sound) and just put things in Park mode. The '80s being the overwhelming favored era, of late. About which, the less said the better.

* * * *

And I say "that fucking Rapture record" because I think it was when I first heard the thing (that being their second one) that I began to suspect that something dodgey might be afoot. Song after song where I could easily spot the sources they had plundered from – guitar riff derived from source x, melody lifted from y, vocal stylings closely shadowing those of z. I found it a bit appalling – not knowing whether all the shameless plagiarizing and lack of originality could be attributed to cynicism, laziness, or a mixture of both. And also a befuddled, because it had only been about – what? – eight years since the band Wire had sued the folks in Elastica, claiming (quite correctly) that the latter that nicked the guitar riff for the thir own "3 Girl Rhumba." And if I recall, Elastica had to settle out of court, but then turned around and – cheekily, I presume – lifted a bit from another Wire tune on their second album.

So I reckoned that some standards must've shifted in the interim.

* * * *

images: sam durant

Hal Foster, writing about the art of Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean and Sam Durant, in his 2004 essay "An Archival Impulse":

"Durant is drawn to two moments within the archive of postwar American culture in particular: late modernist design of the 1940s and '50s (e.g., Charles and Ray Eames) and early postmodernist art of the 1960s and '70s (e.g., Robert Smithson). Today the first moment appears distant, but as such it has become subject to various recyclings, and Durant offers a critical perspective on both the original and its receptions. The second moment is far from closed: it includes 'discourses that have just ceased to be ours,' and so might indicate 'gaps' in contemporary practice -- gaps that might be converted to beginnings (again, this is the attraction of this threshold for some young artists). Like Hirschhorn and Dean, then, Durant presents his archival materials as active, even unstable – open to eruptive returns and entropic collapses, stylistic repackagings and critical revisions."

And, in an accompanying footnote:

"...'So often I am attracted to things conceived in the decade of my own birth,' Dean (born in 1965) has commented; the same often holds for Durant and others of his generation."

* * * *

conor harrington - 'bang bang you shot me down' (detail), 2009

"I don't seek, I find." Or so Picasso reputedly once stated about his own artistic methods. In each of their essays, Kahn and Rose imply the same concerns that others have raised previously, mainly those concerns that envision the contemporary culturescape as a beach layered thick with flotsam, all of it being combed by a legion of young creatives waving metal detectors to & fro. Of course this sort of scenario immediately brings the question of diminishing returns to mind, as we've already seen plenty of recent examples of recyclings of recyclings, pastiches of pastiches, extended ad infinitum until all the entropic and atrophic elements so inherent in these ourobouric processes drag everything to some vanishing point of semiotic self-cancelation.

* * * *
This sort of scenario could perhaps be described, if we had to settle on a single word, as decadence. Not decadent in the standard sense, but in the aesthetic sense. And in that aesthetic sense the term has typically been used to describe the academic/Salon art of 19th-century France. That being the Beaux-Arts canon as defined by a rigid protocol and hierarchy – the ranking of acceptable artistic styles, iconography, and subject matter. All of it in the end amounting to the erudite and properly acculturated speaking to an audience of same. With the styles and subjects being so filtered and limited that the canon can only feed off itself, continually recycling itself with only the slightest of allowable variations. And yes, broadly speaking we're talking about the same canon that produced Ingres and Bouguereau, but for every Ingres or Bouguereau there were (easily) hundreds of hacks cluttering up the walls of the wings with more of the same ho-hummery.

And we all know what results from an insular and perpetually narrowing gene pool, don't we?

Which is exactly the sort of thing that the so-called avant garde rebelled against – the grain that certain artists bristled against, be it Courbet or Manet or Cezanne or Repin and the Russian Itinerants or etc.¹ And there were a lot of etceteras, since a number of artists found that this stifling mode of artmaking didn't speak to them, that all the repetition got numbingly boring quickly enough, and reckoned there were plenty of other people who might feel likewise.

* * * *

image: jacques villeglé

Speaking from his own personal experience, Aaron Rose relates his teenage discovery of a neighborhood punk record store and the L.A. bookstore Amok (which are two formative points of cultural discovery I can relate to from experience). He discusses how punk, etc. related & connected to formulating a sense of identity and self-defining ethos in relation to the dominant culture, arguing:

"Being 'anti-' didn't necessarily mean being nihilistic, at least not in any serious way, but it did suggest that the world that I had been sold by the government, my parent and schools was no longer relevant to a lifestyle that I wanted to lead. I had received a cultural get-out-of-jail-free card and I accepted it with an immense gratitude the likes of which I had never come close to before in my life."

From there he offers a curtain call of the usual 20th century American subculturati -- early pioneering jazz musicians, the beats, the Abstract Expressionists, hippies, punx, and whatnot -- misfits & outsiders living in self-exile from the mainstream. This, he argues, is the only sort of environment conducive to fostering "new ideas" and creative originality.

Which is bound to strike many readers as being a bit Romantic, and which is why I bring the idea of the avant garde into the discussion. And ultimately a return to the avant-garde notion of creative innovation is what Rose seems to be calling for -- or at least the part of it that emphasized the necessity of linear progress, originality, authenticity, etc. All those Modernist ideas that were called into question and largely dismantled some decades ago by postmodern/post-structuralist critical turn.

And while that last bit may seem a bit farfetched, bringing something so esoteric and academic to the table, I don't think it is by much. In some ways a lot of those notions have filtered down into pop culture over the past couple decades, if only in some very simplified and bastardized ways (re: the 'Popist' position on the matter of 'authenticity' is deeply po-mo in many respects). Case in point: the appearance of John Lethem's widely-circulated 2008 essay "The Ecstasy of Influence." While the case Lethem makes against the Copyright Commissars is a recent issue, its tacit, core ideas are largely built on an extensive body of literature on the "author function" that stretches back for many decades -- Bloom, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, et al.

* * * *

In her essay, Mandy Khan makes the comment that the previous decade made her sometimes feel like she was living "in a Rauschenberg poster." Throughout the book, the term collage is used in the generic sense; but the term perhaps begs for some examination of the matter and method of collage proper.

Collage having been developed just over a century ago, being a uniquely Modernist practice first devised by the Cubists (Picasso, Braque, and Gris), who developed it as a pictoral strategy interrogating conventional methods of representation and the "readability" of the picture plane, of bypassing the constraints of "illusionism" and linear perspective.²

Formalist considerations aside, there was also the question of content -- of the material chosen and incorporated into the collage. The original practice of collage involved, obviously, "found" material -- a considered selection and use of whatever was at hand. An exercise that required a certain resourcefulness, that resourcefulness limited to -- if not partially dictated by -- whatever materials the artist had within reach. But of course digiculture has eradicated such limitations by bringing everything (theoretically) within reach, making nearly everything accessible.³

But the modernist practice of collage is often framed as an affront to established hierarchies in art by way of it s integrating the effluvium of everyday life and the common (the cheap, the "vulgar" and basely material) culture into the realm of art. In a sense it also -- perhaps -- represents a refusal or a shutting-out of another, competing early modernist impulse – that of Symbolist aesthetics and all its Romantic (and sometimes mystical) impulses -- its gravitation to and emphasis on the transcendent, the sublime, subjective interiority, the inchoate, and its quasi-Platonic drive toward more pure forms of abstraction.

* * * *

Bob's White Years

Like his contemporaries associated with the early formation of Fluxus, Rauschenberg claimed to be interested in "working in the gap between art and life." Rauschenberg combing through the effluvium of the visual and material culture that surrounded him, through trash heaps or junk shops to create his early his "combines" and assemblages. All of which owes it artistic DNA to the Merz work of Kurt Schwitters, by which it earned the label "neo-dada." And like his Fluxus fellow travelers, Rauschenberg owed a huge inspirational debt to the ideas of John Cage, under whose influence he'd fallen while attending Black Mountain College in the early 1950s. But as some have pointed out, Rauschenberg initially took Cage's ideas in altogether different, more "zen" and conceptual direction. It was only after having he traveled to Italy and encountered the "sacchi" work of Alberto Burri that he changed course; prompted by Burri's use of burlap, textiles, and tar to sift for materials in the common culture.

* * * *
Obviously I'm merely doting on a specific term; and by extension the set of artistic practices that the term implies. What Kahn and Rose are referring to more precisely isn't "collage" so much, but rather pastiche -- pastiche in the Jamesonian "speaking in a dead language," "crisis of historicity" respect, the terminal end of a particular postmodern trajectory.⁴ Culture having arrived at a state of being that is ouroborically self-cannibalizing -- chronically self-reflective, self-referential, regurgitative, etc. Thing is, many of us -- if walking certain ideas through to their logical resolution -- might have long ago reckoned that such an impasse was inevitable, might have sighted the cul-de-sac well in advance.⁵

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1. I say the "so-called" avant garde, if only because the term is one that I've long had reservations about using, a term with a dubious history, and I use it here only as a default.

2. At which point, I suppose, certain distinctions should be made; since collage was adopted by a variety of artists and employed to different ends. For the Berlin Dadaists, collage (and photomontage) served as a "political weapon" for satirizing and critiquing the culture of early Weimar Germany. Kurt Schwitters and Dadaists of the Zurich and Paris camps used it as a purely aesthetic exercise, as a method of utilizing the role of chance as a means of art-making. Likewise for the Surrealists, who believed that the elements of randomness and chance could also provide a key to exploring the Subconscious (thereby short-circuiting the repressive and destructive mores of European bourgeois society).

3. Another distinction to be made: That the original process of collage involved items, detritus, etcetera from mass-produced, material culture (which is something I've touched on before, albeit in a different context). Whereas the mode contemporary mode under discussion most often deals with that culture of objects and images in its dematerialized form -- by way of the proliferation of its mediated representation and facsimile via the internet.

4. Re, collage vs. pastiche: Whatever differences might be drawn between the two, both involve a particular relationship to/engagement with culture and its products.

5. If not "inevitable," then at the least a likely outcome.

Forget the Future/The Future of Forgetting

2012-01-13T12:34:00.004-05:00

Image: Dave Jordano [ # ]

At the Design Observer site Places, "The Forgetting Machine: Notes Towards a History of Detroit," in which contributor Jerry Herron sorts through the aestheticization of dereliction by way of the recent glut of "ruin porn," the Motor City's provisional efforts at urban reclamation, and the fate of Detroit as possible cipher or harbinger of the telos of contemporary economics...

"This is a history created by serial default. Nobody really planned the ends — the ruins — of these buildings, any more than they planned Detroit, or America for that matter, despite our dedication to continental-scale projects, beginning with the Declaration of Independence and moving through Manifest Destiny and continuing with the Urban Renewal programs that destroyed America’s cities. We’ve all had a hand in our collective making, and now we’ll have to live with the consequences, not the least of which is our ignorance about the origin of things, so that we stand stupefied or angry or fascinated — camera at the ready — before the monuments to ruination."

The essay is the first in a new series by Herron. The notion of "forgetting machines" was introduced and explained in the author's earlier serialized essay "Borderland/Borderama/Detroit," which appeared in the 2010 Routledge anthology Distributed Urbanism: Cities After Google Earth.* In that prior essay, Herron analyzes Detroit's status as a city/not-city via a historical trajectory that circuitously connects Tocqueville's assessment of the American idea of individualism with Rem Koolhaas's observations about American urbanism. Of interest is his discussion of Henry Ford's famous "history is bunk" decree, in which Herron fleshes out something that I long ago recognized as a distinctly American pathology:

"A history reinvented each day is no history at all, of course, at least not in the usual sense, with all it implies about the narrative chain of cause and effect that binds the present inextricably to the past. And that belief in necessary cause and effect is precisely what Henry Ford is calling 'bunk.' We want to live in a kind of perpetually self-renewing now,... That forever present condition of the individual is precisely what Henry Ford depended on to create a modern industrial work force — not people enmeshed in tradition or each other’s affairs, least of all union affairs, but individuals unfettered from the past, whom machine-made prosperity would turn into believers in Ford’s evangel. What he built, then, both the cars and the factories that produced them, might be thought of as forgetting machines — industrial works that became so successful as to make Ford’s point about the 'bunk' of history seem self-evident. [...]

"Where 'nothing' existed before, then, we were free to plan as we saw fit, getting it right this time, in a way that the old world, mired in history and tradition, could never do. Our cities came into being first as designs — as contracts with some higher ideal that entitled us to do whatever it took. Thus liberated from history, these urban idealizations had embedded within them their own inevitable undoing. Nothing real can ever live up to ideal standards of perfection, so that all our cities in a sense have been cities/not — forgetting machines always already sabotaged by history. But that would come later."

The essay was also reprinted at Places in three parts, and can be read here: 1, 2, and 3.

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* Herron's notion having no lack of precendents over recent decades. For starters, much of what rests at the core of Herron's essay touches upon some of the themes explored by Paul Connerton in How Modernity Forgets.

Dancing About Architecture, IV: 'Rather Than for a Real World'

2012-01-01T23:20:00.006-05:00

Brasília under construction, photos by Marcel Gautherot. Via.

The Atlantic article (see link) and its pull-quote from Simone de Beauvoir prompt me to return to my copy of Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New, for the three paragraphs he devotes to Brasília.* In which planner Lucio Costa is also called out on the carpet for Supreme Malconceptualism. Hughes's verdict echoes that of Beauvoir:

"Brasília, as this place was named, was going to be the City of the Future -- the triumph of sunlight, reason, and the automobile. It would show what the International Style could o when backed by limitless supplies of cash and national pride. ...In the future, everyone would have a car and so the car, as in Corbusier's dreams, would abolish the street. This was carried out to the letter in Brasília, which has many miles of multi-lane highways, with scarcely any footpaths or pavements. By design, the pedestrian is an irrelevance -- a majority irrelevance, however, since only one person in eight there owns a car or has access to a car and, Brazil being Brazil, the public transport system is wretched. So the freeways are empty most of the day, except at peak hours, when all the cars in Brasília briefly jam them at the very moment when the rest of the working population is trying, without the benefit of of pedestrian crossings or underpasses, to get across the road to work."

Which makes me recall an musical item I used to own. Back in the late '90s, the label Caipirinha briefly did a short-run "Architecttura" series of releases of experimental musicians doing compositions that were thematically linked to certain works of architecture. For instance, David Toop doing Itsuko Hasegawa's Museum of Fruit (Yamanashi, Japan). But I recall Panacea's contribution to the series involved a homage to Niemeyer's Brasília. On which the artist completely ditched ditched his trademark drum'n'bass/quasi-gabber rhythms, instead opting for downtempo or beatless soundscapes that are often as cold and airlessly spatial and inhuman as Costa's city planning. An envisioned utopian as a synthetic dystopia. One sample from the thing ...

:: Panacea - "Void of Safety"

But that's just the atmosphere of the thing. I recall finding much of thing (musically) too angular, and not particularly bringing to mind the more curvilinear and organic aspects of many of Niemeyer's buildings. Much of it, somewhat appealingly, had a very depopulated and nocturnal vibe about it, as well.

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* Yes, I've been known to read Robert Hughes from time to time; despite the fact that he's so "conservative" and that I often disagree with him about on almost everything that's transpired since 1950. And I mainly like him because he's often, in the strictly technical sense, an impeccable and eloquent writer. Which helps, especially seeing how -- when it comes to architecture in particular -- he can often be a shameless hack, merely rephrasing the ossified & honored verdict or what other critics had long since decreed. Which (for example) has everything to do with his verdict on Pruitt-Igoe so rotely follows that of Charles Jencks, and which is probably why his remarks on Brasília shadow those of Beauvoir.

Night of the Invasion of the Living Baby Jesus Eaters (or: Start the 'War on Xmas' Without Me)

2011-12-21T23:59:00.002-05:00

Just because. Part of that because being that I'm about to hit to road for rounds of Seasonals. But also because most of that traveling will involve having a nice holidays in the company of some good folk. And because I hope your holidays shape up nicely, too.

Binge & Purge

2011-12-21T13:14:00.003-05:00

In the course of recently trading comments about the passing of director Ken Russell, a friend observed:

"And nearly every film he made had a scene where someone writhes around in shit, mud, food etc. etc. I think he was working on toilet-training issues sometimes -- very 70s!"

And I suppose it was. Or it sometimes seems that way on reflection. It very much seemed that way over the years when I looked at some of the performance art of the era, particularly that of Paul McCarthy and the duo included above, the Kipper Kids. Lots of smearing of and wallowing in foodstuffs and/or anything that might vaguely resemble excreta. Never sure why that was exactly, why that sort of thing had some sort of resonance at the time, turning up as a trope that diagnostically pointed in the direction of some societal neurosis or something. Maybe something connected to the continuing popularity of Freud and psychoanalysis, perhaps? Or maybe it was the product of some sort of nagging puritanical cultural subconscious, a way of acknowledging and exorcising certain demons. Because it was the end of the postwar boom – a two-decade roll of middle-class affluence and all the consumerist, material benefits it'd brought about. And about how that culture of consumption had been driven by a boom in advertising in order to sell that ceaseless gush of goods, advertising of course being all about stimulating or creating desire (false or otherwise), targeting and directly addressing the Id and infantilizing each member of its audience in the process. Dunno -- it's all part of an impression I've carried around for years, but have never gotten around to researching.

But yeah, apparently the Kipper Kids were pretty foremost in the performance art scene of the 1970s. Their work always struck me as the combination of a food fight and some poo-flinging monekyhouse melee, as staged in some Hamburg vaudeville dive under the direction of Jerzy Grotowski. I first heard of 'em in the early-mid 1980s, probably via High Performance magazine. Yes, there actually was a magazine exclusively devoted to performance art once upon a time; and considering the cultural backwater I grew up in, I have no idea why copies turned up on the mag rack of a local second-hand bookstore in my hometown, but there it was. It being the mid '80s, Laurie Anderson had already sort-of brought performance art into the broader culture, her success having hipped a good many people to the idea that such a thing existed, and that it was big in New York and it had a history. And it was in the pages of High Performance that I learned a little about its recent history; not just about the Kippers and McCarty, but also about Marina Abramovic & Ulay, and Rachel Rosenthal, and it's also where I first encountered the names of Spaulding Grey and Eric Bogosian and Karen Findley just slightly before they made national names for themselves. And since the bulk of this stuff was centered in New York, it overlapped with some of what was going on in the music community, which meant that the magazine was probably the first place I read about Christian Marclay and people of that ilk.

And, ironically enough, it was the first time I recall reading anything about the Blue Man Group. Because I remembered them being reviewed in the backpages of the mag sometime around 1985, when they'd just started out and the thing just some off-Broadway production, a much smaller and modest affair than the big complex, franchised affair that it would become some years later. I recall it had a photo from the performance of the blue men all sitting at a table side to side, each of them with his own box of Cap'n Crunch cereal; because apparently at some point in the production they would big through the boxes, stuff the cereal into their mouths, and chomp it all up and then spray it out of their mouths. So I guess by that point the whole business of excess and foodstuffs had long since settled into some performance-art cliché that was game for satirizing.

And then there was Virgin Prunes. Perhaps you've heard of them, because – yeah – they were a musical group. They hailed from Dublin and in some ways they were an odd sibling group to (no less) U2. In their early years there were a number of stories circulating about them. One story had it when they'd played one particular venue, they lined the entranceway of the club with renderings from a local abattoir; which seemed like a cross between Abramovic & Ulay's Imponderabilia and some sort of Aktionist outing. And then there were reports of shock tactics that included simulated oral sex and rolling around in some suspicious-looking substance onstage. Never knew if any of the stories were apocryphal or not; but if true, they certainly got people's attention. Glam's camp and theatricality merged with the visceral end of then-contempo performance art. Soon to be followed by Die Tödliche Doris out of Berlin, who took the art part of the art-rock rubric to such a conceptual extreme that the music often seemed like a superfluous by-product of their activities, a mere residue.

There, was all of the above sufficiently meandering and pointless? Yeah, figured as much.

'All we do is complain.'

2011-12-18T11:29:00.008-05:00

Rem Koolhaas, in an interview with Spiegel Online, speaking about assembly-line cities and working in an unstable ideological environment:

"Under neoliberalism, architecture lost its role as the decisive and fundamental articulation of a society. ...Take, for example, the prefabricated building. No matter how misguided this ultimately turned out to be, it actually was a very clear articulation. But neoliberalism has turned architecture into a 'cherry on the cake' affair. The Elbphilharmonie is a perfect example: It's icing on the cake. I'm not saying that neoliberalism has destroyed architecture. But it has assigned it a new role and limited its range."

Interesting to me is the part on the second page where Koolhaas states: "In an age of mass immigration, a mass similarity of cities might just be inevitable. These cities function like airports in which the same shops are always in the same places. Everything is defined by function, and nothing by history." Which is more-or-less Marc Augé's idea of the non-place, but applied on a larger civic scale. Which makes me think of a comment that turned up in Glenn Gould's radio documentary The Idea of North: "When the time comes that every place is like everyplace else, will anyone want to go anywhere?"

via Down With Utopia

Lineage (The Way of All Flesh)

2011-12-16T01:11:00.016-05:00

in the beginning, something about the word. but before that bit about the beginning
there was a lot of business about how mamoaha begat slipshad, and how slipshad
begat hamrach, and hamrach begat nimrod, & so on & so on. the stuff
that was in the gospels but never gospel proper, what only made it into the worst
of sermons and fell between the crevices of all the killings and the fuckings, the
cursings and redeemings, the departures and wanderings and arrivals. the last of
which seem to be -- once you think about it -- always and foreverly forthcoming
and a little too heavily reliant on a surplus of (ahem) trust.

before all that: the word supposedly spoken, and then (eventually) scratched down.
the word made flesh, or at least given worldly weight -- legs, if you will -- with its
shaping in the meat of the mouth. its meaning only by way of agreement, a signing
on some undrawn line. that agreement being only that which was mutually known.
the thing we each acknowledge, that lay there between us on the table.

but the only things that can really be known or trusted are those that arrive
well in advance of words. words too often arriving very late to the scene, like
the ambulance rolling up hours after the crucial moment, long after we'd sent word
to the sheriff, with someone having agreed to set out on foot carrying, how it had to
be done before the wires and the telephones made it out our way.

a narrative given shape, strung together and given beginning, middle, end.
tales passed from one to the next, the words there for the purpose of telling.
the sort of tale that sometimes -- some times -- reaches the point where language
breaks down, collapses, that goes a place that words can't go, where description falls
short and takes its leave, leaving just the prelingual utterance, sans syntagma.
because hurts of a certain kind have a quality of (if they must be spelt)
oooooooooaaaaoooooooo,
mmmnnnhhhhmmmmm.

* * *

and it's tiring, killingly so. it gives me a goddamn headache sometimes how some
cats think they can map all this stuff out -- with everything connected or correlated,
categorized and labeled, with everything falling properly into place, all named and
laid out tidily, fixed (supposedly) with certainty about their relatedness. but the
only thing one knows for certain is causality, and even that itself is all wound up in
randomness and happenstance, and beyond that everything else is just guesswork.
but the one thing one can be assured of is the hurts, and the varying qualities
and depths thereof.

now: the hand held aloft, its inside offered up for scrutiny, for decipherence. that fate
is something etched on the skin is another given, among the first things you learn. so too
with the ways in which everything is encoded. delineation, a schematic: the interrelation
of all things, each connected to another. this line tells of progeny, kinship. and over
here we have betrayal. here, the most dooming of jealousies. and here desire. here
abandonment. here fortune. and over here need. and here in need. and here ahhhhh,
and over there unnghhn...

with all of these leading to, pointing to nothing bigger than
THE DAY THAT YOU WILL DIE.

come sooner,
come late

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image: John Lee Hooker, 1951.

Photograph by Clemens Kalischer.

'The odd misery through the murk.'

2011-12-13T09:42:00.002-05:00

T. J. Clark, writing in the LRB, reviewing the current Tate Modern retrospective of the work of Gerhard Richter:

"The idea of working from the photograph seems in Richter, again from the beginning, to have been bound up with the idea of almost painting things out. A kind of botched concealment comes from the photograph as if it were its inner perfume. The photographic seems much of the time to be another word for the lifeless. ...The photo-language is archaic: that is what the dim monochrome suggests to me most powerfully. It speaks to a false fixation on the past – maybe that of a refugee from East Germany, maybe that of post-Hitler Germany in general. ...Richter’s is a world where even fetishism does not work: the shine on the nose of appearance, which one or two canvases bring on emblematically – ineffectively – can do nothing against philosophy, or art after Auschwitz, painting its grey on grey. That cliché again...

Perhaps I have pulled out the stops of despair and disorientation in the last paragraph, but not by much. Richter’s 1960s is a horrible decade. His past in the DDR seems to cling to him, and always he turns from the imagery of the future on offer in the world he has chosen – the new freedom and equality of the children in the porn shots – with a shudder. The Red Army Faction is near. There are some cityscapes painted in 1968 and 1969, in particular Stadtbild SL (from which Luc Tuymans learned brilliantly), where all the achieved non-life of modernity is painted with a truly chilling lack of affect, as if seen by a sociopath looking through the sights of a gun."

* * *
"Richter is the painter at the furthest remove, I reckon, from Adorno’s sense that the whole and only point of art is always to find – to instantiate – concrete particularity in a world of false vividness. Vividness for Richter, if it comes, will have to have falsity written deep within it. I guess this is the strong side (the genuinely disabused-of-illusion side) of his Duchampianism.

[...] Perhaps Richter is a petit bourgeois nihilist: the question the righteous leftist commentators might have asked themselves, however, is what the nerveless attitude allows him to ‘say’ about neo-Leninism; whether nihilism (whatever its class ascription) is now the only vantage point from which the ghost dance of revolution can be chronicled."

Article here.

The Dematerialization of the Art Object

2011-12-10T18:38:00.010-05:00

By now most everyone is familiar with Walter Benjamin's essay 1936 "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Especially with Benjamin's argument that photographic reproduction brings about a "withering" or diminishing of the art object's "aura" -- its value, authenticity, or "authority" as a singular, hand-crafted artifact in material culture. He explained:

"Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original. [...]

The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object."

André Malraux took this idea as the premise for his Le musée imaginaire (or Museum Without Walls), arguing that this process of reproduction and disconnection ultimately liberates art objects from their historical and physical origins, thereby making them available to circulate broadly throughout the public sphere.

And about specific some specific works of art: Above is Gustav Courbet's The Stone Breakers (aka, The Quarrymen), painted in 1849. In some ways it's an archetypal Courbet painting, in that it typifies certain elements of his work -- primarily its gritty and grubby portrayal of figures performing manual labor, a subject considered -- by the academic dictates concerning genre painting and the like -- controversial at the time on account of being too lowly and crude, and therefore unworthy of depiction. As such its an example of the "Realist" aesthetic that Courbet shared with his critical champion Emile Zola. It's also considered in many ways of the ethos that not only informed Courbet's Realism, but also his politics, as well.* While it's not as famous as his A Burial at Ornans or The Painter's Studio or a couple of his other works, it ranks highly enough to have frequently reproduced over the years, quite frequently as the sole of representative example of Courbet's work in survey-level art history textbooks.**

But the painting itself no longer exists, and hasn't since 1945 when it was destroyed during the ariel bombing of Dresden. At the time the painting was reputedly aboard a transport truck that was carting it and some 154 other works away from Dresden for safer territory, a truck which was quickly targeted and destroyed by an RAF bomber. Which is why it turns up, alongside works by Ruebens, Caravaggio, Cranach, Van Gogh and many others in this Flickr pool someone's assembled of "Lost Art: Masterpieces Destroyed in War," a collection of some 170 images that appears to be a subset of an online collection of images posted by the Clark Art Institute. With each, there is no longer an original from which all reproductions are taken, there are just the facsimiles.

Turning up in the pool are Otto Dix's Street Fight and War Cripples, each depicting various aspects of the political turmoil of post-WWI/Weimar Germany. Which draws our attention to the text that accompanies the pool, which states that the photos "represent the only remaining documentation of important works of art -- art that was destroyed before high quality color photography became the standard for documenting art." Leaving them, it seems, to carry on in their existence in diminished form --in an achromatic virtual half-life.

A number of works, particularly landscapes, by Gustav Klimt turn up due to the destruction of a private collection in Austria during the final days of WWII. among the many works lost was Music II, which I've seen many times before; and for some reason, I'm fairly certain I've seen it (on occasion) reproduced in color. Perhaps my memory's playing tricks on me? Or maybe there are colorized version of the photograph floating around. Or maybe a color lithograph version of the painting exists?***

But it seems that the biggest causality of the lot is Casper David Friedrich. It appears that many of the works included were lost in a pair of fires, the first of which (curiously) occurring when the Glaspalast in Munich burned down in 1931. While the fire was apparently deemed an act of arson, its unconnected to with any military actions; seeing how it wildly predated WII proper, and happened nearly a year in advance of Hilter's appointment as chancellor.

And curiously also, Kurt Schwitters's Dadaist Merzbau construction turns up in the collection. Which calls attention to the fact that it is (I believe) the sole entry in the collection that is not a painting. Surely there are plenty of sculpture that have lost to the ravages of war over the years?

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* Courbet having been quite chummy with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and also having served a stint in the hoosegow for his own activities as a Communard.

** The painting also typifies a visual trope that occurs through a good many Courbet works -- that of a figure, often depicted performing some act of manual labor, facing away from the viewer. I believe it was the art historian Michael Fried who once offered the intriguing theory that this recurring figure serves as a "doubling" or a visual analog of the artist -- of the craftsman himself facing into the picture plane while he works.

*** And I actually have a book on Klimt that includes a color reproduction of Schubert at the Piano, so I'm inclined to say that the pool isn't entirely accurate in that respect.

Endnote to the Previous

2011-12-06T10:37:00.004-05:00

And since I'll take any excuse to post music videos however I can get it...

About seven years ago, I happened to attend both the Best and the Worst Show I've Ever Been To within a couple of weeks of each other. Both shows were at the same venue in Baltimore, and both involved established and highly venerated acts of a certain vintage and pedigree. The Worst happened to be finally getting to see The Fall, who I'd long loved; but about the show perhaps the less said the better, because it proved to be one of the most dismal, pointless, and disappointing things I've ever witnessed. (And judging from some of the audience that night, I was far from being the only person there to think so).

But I rebounded just a few weeks later when I first had a chance to see The Ex. It was the exact opposite experience of The Fall show. The Ex played with abandon that night, with a rare degree of sharply-honed energy, passion, and ferocity. Inasmuch as I could ever say I'd seen a band that nearly "blew the roof off the place," it was that show. And I was able to see them a couple more times in Chicago in the years that followed. First was at the Empty Bottle, where the the place was the fullest I'd ever seen it, with the audience wall-to-wall, cheek-to-jowl.

Roughly some eighteen months later, they came through town again; this time bringing with them Ethiopian saxophonist Getachew Mekuria, with whom they'd just recorded an album. I'd just conducted a correspondence interview with guitarist Andy Moor for a Chicago online publication I contributed to, and he'd been most generous with his answers. The venue was larger this time, and the crowd was a little thinner than before, but it definitely more "mixed." About a quarter-to-third of those attending came from the local Ethiopian population. Most of whom danced throughout, though I don't recall seeing anything quite so ecstatic as what appears in the first clip.

And getting to see, at about the same time, Konono No. 1 perform was also pretty great.

At Home I'm a Tourist

2011-12-06T01:19:00.011-05:00

I'll admit, I'm very tempted to jump in on the exoticism/xenomania topic, or at least the "Orientalism" reading of same that's all-too-predictably (if not rotely) be grafted onto it. But I probably shouldn't, because I could off. And by'that I mean on some looongggg-asssss who-cares 200,000-word screed. One that would range from going on about everyone from Claude Debussy (et et et al) to a certain now semi-hip DJ that I corresponded with over a decade who up and asked me at one point if I knew anything a certain type of music his breakcore fellow-traveller DJ told him about that reputedly provided the soundtrack for (he claimed) "Brazilian fight clubs," and about the other DJs who netted a lot of hipster cultural clout a few years later by going poaching in the very same domain dude had been initially asking me about, which in turn brought about the whole "shantytown chic" hipster thing that MIA milked like nobody's biz. And then how the whole West African thing oddly came around a few years later, with everyone from OOIOO to Modest Mouse hopping aboard the Remain In Light Redux train before Vampire Weekend came along with their Graceland 2.0 schtick. Which could lead to a discussion of the burgeoning of the "world music" market back in the 1980s, only a part of which was the "afro-pop" category. And how the whole Awesome Tapes From Africa and Shortwave Music and Sublime Frequencies things were so wonderful at first, because they took such a very welcome "impure" approach to all of this, resulting in the sort of thing that was an old-school ethnomusicologist's worst nightmare.* And how this is nothing new. How the best remark on the topic I recall ever reading was some critic reviewing My Life in the Bush of Ghosts for Rolling Stone magazine back when the album first came out, and saying the thing begged the question of "Does the Global Village Support Two-Way Traffic?" By which he meant: what if non-Western could do a similar plundering in reverse. (Which of course they do, because the culture of the West penetrates the rest of the globe to the deepest degree.) And the fact that Byrne & Eno weren't so much enamored with West African music at the time, but (from the sound of it) had been listening to exactly one West African musician -- King Sunny Adé. And about oh my god, dude I only recently found out that soooo many of those old, early, very rare Adé tunes are now available in boocoo loads on (godloveit) Youtube. And about how there's really really really really nothing new about of any of this, because many books have been written on it already, but with a lot fewer having been written about the reversed flow. And about how -- it's sometimes seemed to me -- there's frequently an element of this afoot with various "folk"-isms; a sort of domestic exoticizing that extends not only across cultural lines, but also those of time and economic class. But hell no, I'm not going to go down down that path; because there's no need, because all that matters is that this topic finally allows me the excuse to post the video above (the first one), which I've been waiting for a flimsy excuse to post for like the past three years. So: Guilty as charged? Yeah, I suppose.**

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* Which could lead to a digression about the parallel resurgence of collections of DIY Harry Smith-style 78rpm excavated Americana, particularly of the "ethnic" variety; with which, when I briefly lived in Baltimore, I had a fair number of wonderful evenings having my mind blown by such stuff thanks to an around-the-way connection with someone who's since gone on to start his own label for releasing collections of same.
** And NO, the above post is not a intended as a swipe at Simon. And not to be construed as such. In fact, I thought he covered the topic quite excellently in the MTV IGGY piece; not only with lining up the glut of corresponding trends of recent years, but also in acknowledging the problematic aspects of each.

We Like It Raw

2011-12-02T10:54:00.001-05:00

A photo blog, presently some 46 pages deep, devoted to everyone's favorite architectural bête noire. And because it's a tumblr, it only follows that it's called Fuck Yeah Brutalism. Leagues better than any of the Flickr brutalism photo pools I've picked through, because this one upholds its own aesthetic integrity by only using vintage photos. Yeah sure, a lot of the usual classics (the Simon Fraser campus, et al) are there; the thing provides an internationally comprehensive survey, complete with drawings and models for unrealized projects. And one would expect as much, seeing how the guy who puts it together teaches architectural design & theory at Kent State University.

Getting Hammered (Love is Colder Than Death)

2011-12-01T14:35:00.005-05:00

Consider this an extrapolative riff on the previous post; about which a friend popped up with something in the comments box that got me to thinking. She pointed out that my selection of header image -- one of the many variants from Robert Longo's Men in the Cities series -- turned up in the latest edition of Adbusters magazine.

Which prompted me to realize something about the cultural status of Longo's series, how it entered into the larger culture back in the early 1980s and has more or less stayed there ever since -- frequently reproduced, recycled, visually quoted, and etc. It's fair to say that its a body of work that's emblematic of its era, if not of a certain aspect of the larger culture that was emerging during the Reagan years. Plenty of people have seen some image from the series used in one context or another over the years, even if they can't identity it or know where it originally came from.

The series of large drawings, which Longo produced in 1979, were based on photographs the artist had staged and taken himself. In the years that immediately followed, these images were commonly viewed as some cheeky social commentary, on yuppiedom specifically -- contorted caricatures of business-district types spinning amidst the whirl of the accelerating and increasingly diffuse rush of contemporary life -- buffeted and dizzied to point of practically being yanked out of their shoes.

Longo's series was something of an instant hit, and for something that came out of the fine-art world, it circulated broadly throughout the culture at large. For instance, I recall seeing reprints from the series turning up in Spin magazine sometime around 1986. It was a backpage piece, maybe one penned by Glenn O'Brien or one of their regular contributors at the time, in some piece titled "Do You Want to be a Rock'n'Roll Star?" Something about those images spaced across the top of the page with that header running under it made immediate sense. The rock'n'roll reference drew out something about the images. Specifically, it underscored how these urban yuppies types appeared -- obliterated on their evening's intoxicant(s) of choice, mindlessly dancing away in some club, and how each figure -- floated by the artist in a blank white field -- looked like a specimen isolated in its own little egocentric universe. Or, looked at another way, some of the figures' flailing about made it look like they were playing air guitar. Something about playing air guitar deeply resonated in those years -- paralleling and coalescing with the alternate economic universe that was coming into being at the time. Yeah, here's to living in your own movie.

Like I said: Emblematic of an era. All too, the more I think about it.

But Longo didn't just pull that series of images out of the air. Like a number of NYC artists of his generation, Longo was a big fan of the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The German filmmaker cranked out an insane number of films over the course of his shortened career, and these films has been very chic among the New York cultural set during the 1970s. Longo was taken with one Fassbinder film in particular, Fassbinder's 1970 neo-noir/gangster film homage The American Soldier. More specifically, Longo seemed to be obsessed with one particular part of the film -- its closing scene, in which the main protagonist, a contract killer named Ricky, and his friend Franz (played by Fassbinder himself) are gunned down in a railway station corridor by the police. As soon as the fatal shots are fired the scene kicks into slo-mo, and the viewer is treated to a brief totentanz as the figures of Ricky and Franz twist and spin about from the impact of the bullets...

When the film finally turned up in Manhattan cinemas in 1976, Longo gravitated to this final sequence, quickly incorporating the figure of a man frozen in the throes of death into a series of performance works entitled Sound Distance of a Good Man. Shortly thereafter, he began reworking the that same motif a number of ways in what would become the Men in the Cities series. Here's Longo himself talking about the series, from a clip about his recent project of reviving Men in the Cities as a series of colorized digital prints...

The original idea having originally come from a cinematic shooting. And it was this stealthy theme that I thought I saw echoed in his later Body Hammers series of large graphite & charcoal drawings -- a set of severe, blown-up renderings of various models of handguns. It was as if Longo was revisiting the core idea for Men in the Cities, but reversing the perspective; this time turning the focus towards the fatal weapon itself, toward the instrument from which the bullets issued.

So there's that matter of the violence and morbidity that lay at the core, with the germinating source, of Longo's Men in the Cities series. I suspect that this was the sort of thing that Gail Day, in her review of the current V&A "Postmodernism" exhibition, was referring to when she stated that postmodernism often "treated the reminder of death as a deliberate leitmotif." A sort of momento mori several degrees removed, remotely masked behind a layering of veils. And there's that other hallmark of postmodernism -- its incestuous intertextuality, the way cultural products perpetually references and comments on other culture products, forming an endlessly intertwining series of riffs, tangents, and juxtapositions.

Like many of his peers of that '80s generation of NYC artists, Robert Longo's fame dwindled considerably in the decades that followed. But in that that period during the early and mid- 1980s, he was among the forefront of NYC's new gen of rising "art stars," he was hailed as something of a po-mo wunderkind. Much of this was because his work often straddled numerous media. Drawing, yes; but also performance, the odd free-standing sculptural work, as well as film and video. And it was his work in this last area that provided him means of sometimes crossing over into the "pop" domain, most often by doing projects with musical artists. For example, one of his works was used as the sleeve art from the Replacements' album Tim. And he also ended up directing a number of music videos; most notably for R.E.M., Megadeath, and New Order. That last item, apparently included in the V&A exhibit, was for the song "Bizarre Love Triangle" -- both of which (the song and the video) have come to be regarded as zeitgeist-defining cultural artifacts over the decades.

'Under the Weight of Its Own Success'

2011-11-30T09:56:00.003-05:00

Gail Day, writing about the exhibition "Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990" at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London) over at MetaMute...

"Sure, I found plenty of pleasures to revel in – vicarious and otherwise. Tapping toes to Talking Heads, snippets from Blade Runner and The Last of England, issues of The Face, a Buzzcock’s single, and reminders of the Hacienda: it was a retro fairground of an earlier life. Lots of stuff I'd thrown away. My own petty possessions and experiences of the '80s were raised to a second power under the museological gaze named 'postmodernism'. At least I had enjoyed using the commodities back then; with their fetish nature transmuted, they looked back at me from their cultic vitrines and display monitors. Interestingly, the temporal economies invoked by the items of popular culture (the mags, the films, the sounds, the looks) didn’t accord with those of the furniture and household objects. If coming across the former felt like rummaging at a jumble sale, the later was more like window shopping in one of today’s emporia, with their Alessi franchises, devoted to designer products. Not all commodities are equal. Of course, for anyone of my generation, the show inevitably had a melancholic underpinning. But, irrespective of when we were born, Postmodernism treated the reminder of death as a deliberate leitmotif. [Charles] Jencks' words, stencilled on the wall, set the scene from the outset: if modernism is dead, 'we might as well enjoy picking over the corpse'. Later, Derek Jarman's voice-over was used to echo the sense of historical caesura and closure: 'Even our protests were hopeless'."

Though I haven't seen it, I was dubious about the exhibition when I saw it announced some months ago, and Day's review gets to the why of those misgivings. It was always a slippery matter, postmodernism -- meaning one thing in literature, another with architecture, and yet another in visual art; with a limited number of overlapping critical concepts to connect them all. A problem that Day addresses quite squarely, especially with:

"'Style and Subversion' was posed as the overarching 'ambiguity' – the all round refusal to be categorised – that was (allegedly) postmodernism. Postmodernism, we were told, was 'a new self-awareness about style itself'. But it transpired that Postmodernism, the show, reduced 'style' to an unreflexive, art-historical category which was used to pin down a period of 20 years: strange to see because, if the debates over postmodernity did one thing, it was to distinguish 'ism' from 'ity'."

But outside the realms of critical discourse and theory, one generally felt at the time that it -- "postmodern" -- amounted to little more than a buzzword. And admittedly trying to curatorially corral much of it into a coherent exhibit would be no easy task. Since you can't exhibit a novel, and seeing how so much of the art of the 1980s carries a tainted stink that continues to repel canonization, why not just shovel in fashion and jewelry and music videos instead? And really, as far as the 1980s are concerned, that seems the most appropriate thing to do. In which case, perhaps the most fitting name for such an exhibition would be: "Postmodernism -- It Was All Just a Bunch of Stuff."

Beyond the Shock Box

2011-11-29T16:03:00.002-05:00

Over at his own 555 Enterprises blog Timh recently had some thoughts about the Chris Burden piece I posted at the 1970s venue and cross-posted here. And he did an astute job of fleshing out some of the subtext, one of the implied underlying themes, of the piece -- connecting it to Stanley Milgram's famed social experiments concerning obedience to authority figures.

Since Timh doesn't have comments enabled on his blog, I e-mailed him directly with some additional thoughts and elaborations, which in turned prompted another response by way of a blog-post. With this second post, Timh incorporates my remarks and continues with his original line of thinking, making some very sharp observations in the process. I especially liked where it arrives in its final stretch, with its "If there is a deity in the art world, it is autonomy" extrapolation.

As Nature Allows

2011-11-28T18:44:00.014-05:00

*

I. Place name: from the ancient Persian, home of fires. The Zoratsrian plume,
   the eruptive arcs of conflagrant fountains, the flame having burned for centuries,
   if not millenia, if not from the beginning of time. For an eternity.

   An eternity having ended soon enough, with its source siphoned out. Drawn off
   'to light, to lubricate, and paint all the world.' The blaze dwindling, dissipated,
   the Brahmins abandoning the temple. The temple then renovated, and left to the
   tourists, for whom the flame had to be piped back in, artificially. A domestic import,
   a diverted diversion, viewable each day between the hours of 9 and 6.

II. While on the horizon the ever thickening, man-made forest burns — brighter and
   monumentally, daily darkening the sky.

III. The sky darkened. Dark: the color (as such) of that (more or less) which is
   (so to speak) not there. That not spoken of, left unquantified. Reification in reverse.
   The world now fully lit and lubed and painted. Permeated and suffused at every level.
   The subtext ungirding all narratives, the presence that can only be inferred. Energy:
   an agent of acceleration and expansion. Nothing, essentially, being the biggest part of
   everything — how the totality operates, and also how it ends. The essence unknown and
   unknowable, unseen and unseeable. Its presence only inferred, the light from distant bodies
   bending as it passes through.

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images: From "Oil Wells at Baku, Close View,"commonly
attributed to Auguste and Louis Lumière, c. 1898 { # }

Three-Minute Zeroes

2011-11-26T18:37:00.008-05:00

So my friend Dave is out in L.A. these days, and I gather he's a little bored and restless because he's started up his own terse Tumblr thing called Correct Music. He's asked if I'd care to do a guest post on the thing, and I'm sure I'll be able to come up with something. But knowing me, it'll surely run wildly afoul of the terse criterion.

And over at his scratchpad blog, Simon's recently been doing a series about "shite bands that filled up the pages in Melody Maker" back in the late 1980s; MM being a publication Simon was at in his early days, and the late '80s being -- by his and others' reckoning -- "the era of bad (British) music."

All of which prompts me to recall a series I'd sort-of been thinking of doing for a while. A series that'll most likely be infrequent and probably very short-lived. A series that'll constitute me breaking my own format; but as I've already established, seeing how I'm the sole proprietor of this here thing I can do whatever I want. So, here we go. A series that for lack of any proper title is about Absolutely Inessential/Forgettable Artists Who Had Exactly One Perfect Song. And here's our first candidate...

As I recall, it was 1979 when this tune crept up the charts in the U.S.. Which was an interesting time to be listening to the radio. Y'see, it was wake of the Big Disco Crash -- with the hegemonic reign of disco being officially and finally OVER, and a backlash following in its wake. As a result, the pop charts got a bit eclectic for a while as people were definitely hungry to hear something other than disco and radio programmers were scrambling around cluelessly trying to come up with things to fill the void and scratch that itch. That's about the time that when Cheap Trick belatedly scored their first nationwide big radio hit, and that The Knack's "My Sharona" effectively became the certified Fuck-Disco-I-Wanna-Rock backlash anthem. D.C. Go-go had its first (and practically only) early moment in the sun as Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers' "Bustin' Loose" topped the Soul charts at around the same time. And how else to explain M's "Pop Muzik" rapidly becoming a number 1 hit on this side of the pond? An odd assortment of sounds and style floating around in the mainstream for a brief time, without any predicatbilty or apparent logic.

And then there was this song, which did a good job of Passing For Normal. Of course, it sounded like it'd had a lot of help, in terms of studio production -- lots of embellishments that help reassure the listener that everything was okay. There's the feigned muscularity of the electric guitar riffing, which sounded very much like an gratuitous afterthought or late addition. And the warmth of the organ, being played in a way that blandly reeked of West-Coast '70s Sophistication, which when combined with the strumming of the acoustic guitar might've almost made you think you were hearing a new Gerry Rafferty record. There were other added features, as well -- like the punctuating blips between bracketing the verses; as well as those backing vocals, which at times ("What can I dooooooooo?") threatened to go all histrionic on you.

But there was something about the song, it seemed to me then and it strikes me as I revisit the things decades later, that seemed odd. Something about the song that, despite all the aforementioned baubles, struck me as surprisingly bleak. Part of that impression probably stem from the minimalism that makes up the better part of the song -- the steady, stark rhythmic being hammered out by the drums, the organ and the acoustic guitar that are almost motorik in their persistence and monotony. The vaguely raspy grain of the vocals add to the effect. And then there's the lyrics, which might have struck people as being celebratory, but if so they're only beguilingly so. Or self-delusional, more like, because it seems whatever comforts the narrator offers are little more than empty assurances. As a song, it has clammy-handed, foggy-headed cocaine comedown written all over it -- one in which maybe you can't regret what you don't remember, but still you find you have to climb behind the wheel and hit a winding road late at night, perpetually focused on whatever presents itself in the narrow cameo of the headlight, not driving to get anywhere in particular but just to put some physical distance between yourself and all the things you Simply Can't Cope With Anymore. (And whatever you do, avoid getting pulled over by the police, because you know that'll only end badly, making everything worse, given the state you're in.)

Or that's how it sounds to me now, and I recall intuiting that same impression when I first heard it. But I was only about 12 years old at the time, so a lot this -- especially the part about cocaine -- wouldn't have crossed my mind at that age.

At any rate: The outfit, if memory serves, was fronted by an artist -- a photorealist painter whose artworks graced the covers of their albums, albums which almost nobody bought and which had a brisk walk to the cut-out bins, because as it turned out the band was actually quite boring and unremarkable, thus making them definitive One-hit Wonders. And something about that one hit seems to me now like something that would've turned up on a movie soundtrack at some point, since it seems like it'd be perfect for a scene in a certain kind of film. But checking IMDB, it appears that it's so far only been used once in that respect, making a fleeting appearance in Boogie Nights; which, if true, I totally don't remember.

Enter the Epiphanator

2011-11-25T14:49:00.000-05:00

"The argument is well posed inside the larger one that the mediasphere demands such 'spikes' of dramatic witnessing, or otherwise it will turn away and move on to The Next Kitten In A Tree. This short-attention-span afflicted dynamic is contrasted with the old-media paradigm they call The Epiphanator [...] The still image moves. But does it still have the power to move?"

"The Atomization of the Image," over at the WFMU blog. (Via)

What We Do is Secret

2011-11-25T12:14:00.002-05:00

Untitled (Reaper Drone), 2010

Chemical and Biological Proving Ground No 2, Dugway, UT, 2006

Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center #2, 2008

PARCAE Spacecraft Over the Yosemite Valley (Naval Ocean
Surveillance System Satellite; 1983-056G), 2010

"We have this idea that secrecy is this perfectly oiled machine but the secrecy system is not all that organized. Also we imagine that there is one single brain orchestrating secrecy behind the whole State but this is not the case. Lots of things are contradicting each other. The secrecy system is internally inconsistent but also incoherent."

. . . . .

"I can only talk from an American perspective. The Black World is a State that is inside the State and it works differently. It's monarchic in the sense that it's not a democracy. It is run by generals and ultimately by the President. There's very little overview of it by other parts of the government and obviously by the people. It has a tendency to change everything around it to its own image."

Excerpts from an interview with Trevor Paglen over at We Make Money Not Art, concerning his recent series of photographs Limit Telephotography and The Other Night Sky, which are currently included in the Architecture of Fear exhibition at the Z33 House for Contemporary Art Center in Hasselt, Belgium. Paglen has also recently published Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, the first monograph collection of his work.

That damned bird

2011-11-24T16:11:00.004-05:00

The Thanksgiving I'll most remember is the one where my grandfather wound up in the Emergency Room. It happened while he made his initial attempt at carving the turkey, having already had about ten beers over the course of the afternoon. The cutting of the hand, and the trip to the hospital that followed. The meal delayed by four hours. Then him returning and everything resuming where it'd left off, but with someone else wielding of the knife. And my grandfather, with his hand all bandaged and having to be held in the air above heart-level to prevent further gushing; bound up so that the injured digit extended outward from the fold. With him sitting there at the head of the table, his arm raised aloft, looking for the better part of the world like Ernest Hemingway endlessly giving everyone in attendance The Finger.*

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* A bit of holiday "flash fiction," if fiction involves 92% fact.

The well-calibrated microphone

2011-11-21T14:20:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the Root Strata blog for the heads-up.

Music for Filmstrips, Vol. 1

2011-11-20T17:41:00.008-05:00

Back when I used to do radio, not too many years ago, I often wound up wearing a variety of hats as far as the whole hosting & DJing biz was concerned. Aside from spinning the standard allotment of breaks, beats & bleeps, for a while I was co-host of a show devoted to experimental music, with a Chicago-based noisician and myself acting as the DJs on alterating weeks. The show's format usually provided an extra hour (midnight!) for doing some extended, uninterrupted, multilayered live mixing. Multiple components all going at once, including locked-groove records and homemade loops -- shaping it all via the station's mixing board. I quite enjoyed it, frequently came up with good results, and it's something that I miss doing.

So it's been a while since I've done anything like that. But this (below) isn't quite one of those things. It started out the other way way, intent-wise; But instead it took its own direction as I worked on it, and turned into something else. Far less abstract, nothing too complex. Plus with a fair share of vaguely rhythmic and musical elements for those who absolutely insist on such things, and maybe a little bit 'hypnagogic' in parts. (Maybe I'm 'mellowing' as I get older. Shrug.) At any rate, give it a try if you're so inclined.

~~::: here :::~~

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tracklisting

◼ steve young / 'michael jordan' / arbor / 2008
◼ sky stadium / 'peace guide' / goldtimers tapes / 2011
◼ motion sickness of time travel / 'the walls were dripping with stars' / digitalis / 2011
◼ lee noble / 'retreat, abandon' / bathetic / 2011
◼ niggas with guitars / 'e.f.o.' / digitalis / 2011
◼ ekoplekz / 'rebus un' / mordant music / 2011
◼ konx-om-pax / 'II' / display copy / 2010
◼ call back the giants / 'the rising|the lizard' / kye / 2011
◼ pulse emitter / 'longing thresholds, pt. 2' / nna tapes / 2010
◼ rambutan / 'immaterial' / deep tapes / 2011
◼ andy stott / 'execution' / modern love / 2011
◼ tidal / 'double death' / 2:00AM tapes / 2010
◼ chapels / 'mantra u.f.o.' / 905 tapes / 2011
◼ nonhorse / 'subtle revenge' / nna tapes / 2010
◼ imaginary softwoods / 'untitled, no. 4' / wagon / 2008
◼ 1958-2009 / 'untitled, no. 1' / ekhein / 2009

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O, but to stab the heavens; if only to bring glory spilling earthward; raining on redeemed and lost alike

2011-11-17T22:49:00.007-05:00

During the last few months that I lived in Baltimore, I happened into some work that often involved having to travel down to job sites in the D.C. 'burbs. I had a foreman who was from Boston, and he designated me to drive the van because he claimed I made better time in traffic than anyone else on the crew. And about that traffic -- it meant having to navigate the Beltway during rush hours each day. It was a pain in the ass, because the Beltway's always mad congested, and for whatever reason people in the D.C./Baltimore area drive like morons.

At any rate, our various routes often had us traveling counterclockwise along the northern stretch of the Beltway during the morning leg. There's a point roughly around Silver Spring where you come upon the enormous Mormon temple in Kensington, MD. It's situated a short distance from the expressway, and as you round the bend the thing suddenly comes into view, looming over the trees like some massive doom fortress. Its broad sprawling blockiness and sweeping verticality, its stark white facade and rigid fenestration, and the tall, thin spires severely piercing upwards in the morning sun like massive gleaming icepicks.

A coworker told me that the thing inspired a routine act of vandalism. Strategically placed across a railway overpass that you drive under just as the temple comes into view, someone repeatedly spray-painted the words, "SURRENDER, DOROTHY."

No matter how many times the graffiti got scrubbed away, it would always reappear shortly thereafter, over and over again throughout the years. Here's an Associated Press photo of that juncture of road circa sometime in the 1980s, graffiti intact...

This article on the thing purports to tell the story of the origin of the graffito in question. Supposedly the thing reminded someone of the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. I'm more inclined to say it possesses some of the qualities of the witch's castle, perhaps because I kept expecting to see winged monkeys come flying out of the thing. Hulkingly oppressive to the point of being ghastly -- very much a textbook example of authoritarian/fascist architecture. More specifically, at first sight it struck me as distinctly Stalinist in style.* Wasn't sure why where that impression came from, perhaps because it reminded me of some other building of that type that I'd seen before.

Yeah, turns out it did. Here we go, got it...

Lomonosov Moscow State University -- the main building, built circa 1949. Tsk.

Incidentally, there's an elaborate Bahá'í temple in the North Shore 'burbs of Chicago that's honkingly spectacular. When we happened across it years ago, the ground view level prompted wifey to comment that it reminded her of a gigantic wedding cake. The building makes an appearance in Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, during the Chicago portion of the travelogue, when Miller's guide leads him to the site late one night when the temple was still under construction.

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* Or, as Eddie Izzard might have it, it's a bluechip epitome of the Big Fuck-Off Stalinist School of Architecture.

Internal Exiles

2011-11-15T11:10:00.006-05:00

The new edition of e-flux journal is up, offering a thumpingly nice theme issue devoted to Moscow Conceptionalism. The issue is primed to coincide with a current exhibition of work by Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions that's being held at the e-flux NYC space, which was curated by Boris Groys.

Broadly, the contributors aim to situate Soviet conceptual art of the 1970s and '80s in relation to to its counterparts in the U.S. and Europe. There's also a common argument for a more context-specific historicizing of the work, a reading that diverges from the perennial critical account of framing the work in an over-simplified "dissident" reading.* As far as specifics are concerned: Groys addresses Soviet conceptualism from an anti-aesthetic angle, contributor Keti Chukhrov offers a materialist parsing of Soviet conceptualism in relation to the anti-libidinal nature of socialist economies, while Claire Wilson delves into the collaborative and participatory nature of many of Collective Action Group's projects. Plenty there for the interested, as well as copious references to other recent literature on the topic for the curious.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

* This was the common account for the work back in the 1980s, when the work of various artists connected with the "Sots Arts" network, received any press in the U.S. and elsewhere. So yes, the Iron Curtain having long since fallen and perestroika having since become an historically remote rubric to filter all such stuff through, perhaps this sort of re-framing is long overdue.

From the Rubble of the Chancellery / Leben mit Pop

2011-11-13T18:00:00.005-05:00

Reading Andreas Huyssen's Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, I come across the following in the author's essay on the art of Anselm Kiefer, here writing about the artist's Occupations photo series of 1969:

"There is another dimension, however, to this work, a dimension of self-conscious mise-en-scène that is at its conceptual core. ...But why ten the Sieg Heil gesture? would suggest that it is to be read as a conceptual gesture reminding us that indeed Nazi culture had almost effectively occupied, exploited, and abused the power of the visual, especially the power of massive monumentalism and of a confining, even disciplining, central-point perspective. Fascism had furthermore perverted, abused, and sucked up whole territories of a German image-world, turning national iconic and literary traditions into mere ornaments of power and thereby leaving post-1945 culture with a tabula rasa that was bound to cause a smoldering crisis of identity. After twelve years of an image orgy without precedent in the modern world, which included everything from torch marches to political mass specatcles, from the mammoth staging of the 1936 Olympics to the ceaseless productions of the Nazi film industry deep into the war years, from Albert Speer's floodlight operas in the night sky to the fireworks of antiaircraft flak over burning cities, the country's need for images was exhausted. Apart from importing American films and the cult of foreign royalty in illustrated magazines, postwar Germany was a country without images, a landscape of rubble and ruins that quickly and efficiently turned itself into the gray of concrete reconstruction, lightened up only by the iconography of commercial advertising and the fake imagery of the Heimatfilm. The country that had produced the Weimar cinema and a wealth of avant-grade art in the 1920s and that would produce the new German cinema beginning in the late 1960s was by and large image-dead for about twenty years: hardly any new departures in film, no painting worth talking about, a kind of enforced minimalism, ground zero of a visual amnesia."

The essay in question was originally published in the journal October in 1988. That being the case, Huyssen is talking about the work that the Kiefer did over the first 15 years of his career. By the late 1980s, the artist's work had already shifted to include a broader array of cultural references and iconography. After Kiefer moved off to France in the early 1990s, critics wrote him off for a stretch, the verdict being that a more "romantic" (supposed French) sensibility had seeped into his work, softening it to some degree. Admittedly, the artist's style did evolve. Yes, he still works on the same large, almost monumental, scale. But there's an elegance to the look of the stuff -- mainly in the handling of materials -- that was absent during his first 20 years of work.¹ The rough-hewn quality that was so much a part of the character of the early work always seemed to be inextricably bound up with the content -- the thick and deeply textured crust of paint denoting the scarred and haunted landscape of the Heimat, while simultaneously implying a throwing-mud-at-the-wall effort of trying to give voice to the unspeakable (or at least the unspoken).²

* * * * * * * * * * *

Huyssen continues in the next paragraph...

"I am reminded here of of something Werner Herzog once stated...'We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs. It's as simple as that.' The absence of adequate images in postwar Germany and the need to invent, to create images to go on living also seems to propel Kiefer's project. He insists that the burden of fascism on images has to be reflected and worked through by any postwar German artist worth his or her salt. From that perspective indeed most postwar German art has to be seen as so much evasion. During the 1950s, it mainly offered derivations from abstract expressionism, tachism, informel, and other internationally sanctioned movements. As opposed to literature and film, media in which the confrontation with the fascist past had become an overriding concern during the 1960s, the art scene in West Germany was dominated by the light experiments of Gruppe Zero, the situationist-related Fluxus movement, and a number of experiments with figuration in the work of Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. The focus of most of these artists, whether or not they wanted their art to be socially critical, was the present: consumer capitalism in the age of America and television. In this context Kiefer's occupations of the fascist image-space and of other nationalist iconography were as much a new departure for German art as they were a political provocation, except, of course, that this provocation was not widely recognized during the 1970s."

Which addresses what I was writing about, albeit by a much more circuitous route, in that bit I wrote about Bowie's "Berlin years" for the '70s-themed outboard venue earlier this year. This matter of historical and cultural limbo that followed the Nullpunkt of 1945, the artistic conundrum of the how to proceed when when a society is anxious about its own past and ambivalent about its present.

This ambivalence is what prompts the reading of the early work of Gerhard Richter as so emblematic of its milieu. Richter generally always had the habit of working in a variety of disparate styles simultaneously. A painterly polyglot, with no style taking any sort of aesthetic pre/eminence over any of the others, since -- by dent of their lack of historical/lineal moorings -- there is no developmental artistic lineage or tradition for them to adhere to. But it's the blurred, semi- photorealist works of the 1960s that are most associated with his "Capitalist Realism" phase, that are exemplary of the early leg of his career. There are the numerous paintings modeled from images taken from various magazines, newspapers, school yearbooks and whatnot, all of which seem to be at once both voguish and utterly mundane.

And then there's a much more problematic painting like Onkel Rudi...

It being an old photograph of a family member dressed up in his S.S. uniform. This one occurs in another series of images Richter produced during those years, derived from anonymous found snapshots taken from family albums. As one critic has pointed out, Onkel Rudi is at once both transgressive and innocuous – transgressive in the way it references a suppressed and sordid past, innocuous because of the fact that almost every German household might have had a snapshot of this sort tucked away somewhere. Yet there it is, appearing amid a large body of work that featured an array of images drawn from modern life – of cars, fashion models sporting evening wear, family portraits, a depiction of a cow from a children's book, etc. All of them blurred and distorted by way of painterly manipulation, all of them blurring together as free-floating signifiers in a cultural landscape. A sort of entropic blankness sets in, as if all these images are -- in the realm of an ahistoric moment in time -- equally meaningless and interchangeable. The selection of images is arbitrary -- with no single image meaning anything more than any of the others, all of them ultimately cancelling each other out. There is, one suspects, a critical disinterest on the part of the painter that borders on nihilism.³

Capitalist Realism, the name that Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Konrad Lueg chose as their collective artistic banner when they first began exhibiting. The fact that they abandoned it shortly thereafter and went their separate creative directions suggest that the sobriquet may've been little more than a nonce marketing move in the first place. Still, it was clearly at the time a German response to the Pop Art sensibility that had already emerged in the U.K. and the U.S. some several years previously. But in Britain and the States, this sensibility had emerged out of a different social context -- with the arrival of "pop" modernity having been a state that these western countries had transitioned into during the postwar period -- a cultural situation that had evolved (as it were) organically. Whereas in Germany there was more the sense that it was – to some degree – being imposed from elsewhere, flooding in to fill a cultural void.⁴

Still, it could be added that this issue or impasse about there being a lack of "adequate images" of the age, and of artists striving to find or create such images wasn't limited to Germany during those years. Among the generation of American artists that started their studies and careers during the 1950s, there was a similar dilemma: What to paint? Abstract Expressionism seemed exhausted and epitomized a type of romanticism that no longer fit the times. It's critical successor, post-painterly abstraction, seemed too digressively formalistic and too decorative. It was, by many accounts, a common question. The question would be answered in a variety of ways -- from Pop, to John and Rauschenberg and the American associates of what would become Fluxus raiding the contemporary common culture for materials and imagery, to someone like Philip Pearlstein playing about with pop subjects before settling into a clinically sterile mode of figure painting. This "crisis of representation" arose from an entirely different context, one that was comparatively unburdened by traditions or the weigh of history. In each instance, however, this aesthetic nullpunkt would prove a pivotal juncture -- strongly dividing the first half of the century from the second.

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1.  No need to construe that this is a necessarily negative thing. Far from it.

2.  Add to this the fragments from the poems of Paul Celan scrawled across some of the paintings, which -- as Huyssen also points out -- in itself echoes Adorno's remark that epic poetry was impossible in the wake of the Holocaust.

3.  Much of this emerging modern consumer culture was leveraged and subsidized by the Marshall Plan, by the U.S. economic assistance that was directed to assist Germany (et al) in the project of rebuilding in the postwar era -- therefore, regarded by some Germans of being of external origins. Some accounts suggest that some Germans of the era were wary of this sudden slam-dunk into this new way of life, resulting in vague sense of malaise and occasional anti-American sentiment. Hence the remark that later appeared in Wim Wender's Im Lauf der Zeit, "The Americans have colonized our subconscious."

4.  The work of Sigmar Polke, however, often proves much more difficult to parse. One detects, especially in his work of the 1970s and '80s, a sense of deliberate irony fueling the work -- the artist's selection of images and the choice of appropriated materials, as well as from the sometimes willful ugliness of the work.

Postscript

2011-11-03T21:54:00.004-04:00

A few strangling thoughts about the previous...

[ 1. ] I'm not altogether certain about how to sum up my thoughts about the work of Chris Burden. It's a varied body of work he's done over the years -- in terms of themes, but especially in terms of quality. Despite the stronger work (a fair amount of which falls within the first decade of his career), there's also been a high ratio of misfires or under-realized pieces, as well as a good number of works that were just plain weak. In fact, there's e enough of the latter to make me sometimes wonder if the early great pieces were -- in each instance -- just some sort of fluke.

As far as those strong early works are concerned: If anything, I mostly focused on works that I always felt had a strong social dimension -- "topical," as some have labeled them. Despite some critics having argued to the contrary, I think it's quite clear that Burden was feeding off of the world around him, being prompted by the cultural climate of the time.

[ 2. ] And it's that matter of topicality that gave the work some traction back then. In some ways, some of his more famously daring or severe pieces (Shoot, of course, and Trans-fixed) still have the same sensationalist reputation these days as they did back then. He was -- at times, and ironically -- perfect tabloid fodder. With people freaking out and getting anxious about the direction the country was heading at the time, they tended to look to the news for things that validated that perception -- "confirmational bias" being some a common impulse. Since, y'know, as the media has known for a long, long time: You'll never go broke pandering to people's prejudices, phobias, etc.. Far from it.

[ 3. ] Another reason for the canonical status is that a number of Burden's works have a remarkable degree of metaphorical resonance. One piece I didn't address in the post was Velvet Water, which Burden did in 1974. The work consisted of him repeatedly dunking his head in a sink filled with water, doing so again and again until he finally collapsed on the floor sputtering and gasping for breath. The entire time, there was a camera fixed on him, relaying a live video feed of the action to an attended audience which sat in adjoining space. At the start of the piece, Burden addressed the cameras, telling the audience: "Today I am going to breathe water, which is the opposite of drowning, because when you breathe water, you believe water to be a richer, thicker oxygen capable of sustaining life."

The audience, meanwhile, was aware that Burden was carrying out this action on the other side of a partition; because they were reputedly still within earshot of the artist's splashing and choking. It's another one of those works where the audience is put in a complicated situation -- in which their passivity and spectatorship becomes (in theory) problematic by way of their culpability in watching someone endanger himself. The whole bit about being party or witness to someone else's delusional undertakings -- it's a scenario that's bound to translate any number of ways. Like say if you ever knew anyone who joined a cult or got involved in some get-rich-quick scheme. Personally, the whole delusional/"transformational thinking" angle reminds me very much of something we all witnessed just this past decade.

[ 4. ] The Delillo bit's a little odd, innit. I suppose I'll always associate Delillo's Mao II with airline hijacks if only because of Johan Grimonprez's DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y; which, when I saw it nearly 15 years ago, reminded me of a replay of my early childhood -- an endless montage of footage from various airports playing out the evening news night after night.

But what gets me is the sentiment expressed about the craft of writing, of being a novelist. Such a quaintly Romantic notion (it seems) to find still circulating in this day and age, with the cultural landscape having been transformed so completely my a variety of electronic media. But you still see that from time to time, the whole business about some writers regarding themselves or what they do as something akin to the "shaping of reality." Odder still, since -- chronologically speaking -- full-fledged po-mo irony emerged in the literary realm some years before it became common in the visual arts. But I think visual artists disabused themselves of thinking in any similar terms -- about seeking after or expressing any sort of cap-t Truth -- somewhere about the time that Clement Greenberg slagged off Jackson Pollock because of the latter's post-"drip" return to figuration.

[ 5. ] Ralph and Wayne each posted some interesting comments on Part 1 of the piece. Still, I've never been terribly convinced by the reading that attributed something akin to a "will to power" to the works. Assessments of that sort always struck me as a bit too much of a surface reading, a little too reductive (and in a way, little more than a cousin far-removed from more sensationalistic/tabloid-ish accounts). While the work frequently does often have to with power and social dynamics and such, I believe its far trickier and more slippery than that -- not so easily or squarely nailed down. Which is probably why I find it intriguing.

Please Stand By (An Inventory of Effects)

2011-11-03T12:42:00.007-04:00

Note: I wrote the below for the outboard 1970s-themed venue. It took a while to write, wrestling with the thing over the span of many weeks -- a good bit of which involved pruning and closing off various tangents and trying to get the thing down to a semi-reasonable length. Given all that, and the fact that working on the thing meant a lack of posting here, I decided to do what I otherwise wouldn't, and reprint the piece here.

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1.

Here we have the American artist Chris Burden, looking like a professional and presenting himself to the world. The above photos come from his 1971 performance art piece I Became a Secret Hippy. It was one of Burden's earliest works, executed about the time he was completing his graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine. For the piece, Burden stripped naked and laid down on the floor while a friend hammered a star-shaped stud into his chest. He then sat in a chair while another friend shaved his head with electric shears. Burden then donned the suit of an FBI agent and presented himself to the event's few attendees.

The real-world incidents that inspired I Became a Secret Hippy are so obvious that they don't warrant an explanation. In that respect, it was far from being a subtle work. But considering that it was done at the time that Burden was leaving the cloistered confines of academia and making his transition into the world of professional artmaking, no doubt its ritualistic, rite-of-passage mimicry held some ironic personal meaning for the artist.

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2.

By many accounts, the early Seventies were considered turbulent years -- a time of political, social, and economic upheaval. Most Americans had entered the 1960s with an optimistic vision of the future that awaited them. But a decade later, it all looked uncertain and many people were getting anxious and doubtful, not daring to guess what might happen next. A common, knee-jerk opinion on the street had it that the world was going to hell. "Shootin' rockets to the moon / Kids growing up too soon… Ball of confusion!"

Soldiers returning home after numerous tours of Vietnam reputedly experienced something akin to culture shock, finding things at home much different from when they'd departed. The rapid pace of technological change, and the societal shifts that resulted, had some in the pop-sociology realm talking of "future shock."

So when people read that somewhere a young man had someone shoot him with a rifle and then called the whole thing art, a number of people were shocked, but probably not all that surprised. This is what passes for art these days. The way things were heading, why not?

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3.

The incident in question -- the one that would become Burden's notorious "greatest hit" -- was Shoot, which followed I Became a Secret Hippy by a mere three weeks. On the evening of November 19, 1971, Burden and a few associates and a small number of attendees met in a low-rent art space in Santa Ana. It was, by most accounts, a pretty modest and casual affair, up to the point when -- at an "Okay, let's do this" moment in the evening -- Burden positioned himself against one of the gallery walls. A friend then raised a .22-calibre rifle, took aim at Burden, and fired a single shot.

The plan was a have a handful of spectators witness a William Tell-styled act of trust, with the designated shooter aiming at the wall just to the left of Burden's shoulder. At the most, Burden later claimed, the rifle slug was only supposed to graze him. But due to poor marksmanship the bullet instead hit Burden in the bicep of his left arm. Not having anticipating such an outcome, no one had thought to bring a first-aid kit, so a bandage had to be improvised.

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4.

Before we go any further, a brief overview might be in order...

Selected Works, 1971 - 1976

Chris crams himself into a small metal locker for five days.
Chris gets shot.
Chris lies in a bed for 22 days.
Chris lies down under a tarp in traffic along a busy boulevard.
Chris nearly immolates himself.
Chris dangles naked tied by a rope around his ankles.
Chris crawls over broken glass.
Chris pushes live electrical wires into his bare chest.
Chris has people use him as a human pin cushion.
Chris runs the risk of immolating himself again.
Chris gets crucified to a Volkswagen.
Chris nearly drowns himself.
Chris gets kicked down two flights of stairs.
Chris nearly sets himself on fire. (Yes, again.)
Chris lies on a shelf, just out of sight, for 22 days.
Chris lies, unmoving, under a sheet of glass for 45 hours straight.
Chris bicycles through Death Valley.

Chris does a bunch of other things during these years, but it's the more violent and alarming and supposedly masochistic things he does that everyone talks about. Thereby making him a bit infamous in the process, saddling him a reputation as the "Evel Knievel of the art world" that he grew to resent.

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5.

Chris Burden didn't consider himself a "performance artist," nor did he ever aspire to be one. He'd originally set out to be a sculptor. In the latter years of his studies, he became preoccupied with the task of creating interactive sculptures -- works that invited the audience to become a part of the piece, that were meant to be engaged and manipulated by the viewer. But he quickly became frustrated and deemed many of his works to be unsuccessful, because each time the audience balked at the invitation, choosing instead to maintain the role of distant and passive spectators.

To remedy this impasse, Burden decided to physically make himself a part of the "sculpture," if not the primary component of the work itself. He did this for his senior thesis project, which involved cramming himself into a 2' x 2' x 3' steel locker for the duration of five days. As word of the Burden's project circulated around campus, the curiosity factor brought a steady flow of visitors. People sat outside the locker, inquiring into his well-being and asking him why he was doing what he was doing. A few people sat for extended periods and -- perhaps confused by the dynamic -- treated him like a Father Confessor and divulged all sorts of personal details about themselves. During the final day of the piece, university administration were debating whether to have the locker cut open, fearing for their own liability in connection with Burden's project.

So, problem solved. But noted for future reference: How to calculate for the vagaries of interpersonal psychology? ¹

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6.

Performance art was, of course, something of a big deal in the artworld of the 1970s, and Chris Burden was regarded as one of its leading and most controversial pioneers. But performance art wasn't such an entirely new thing. It'd first been kicked around by the Futurists and the Dadaists in the early part of the century, then gone dormant for many years before being reanimated in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily by way of the "happenings" staged by John Cage and his disciples in the Fluxus movement.

If there was any recent historical precedence for the type of work Chris Burden was executing in the early '70s, it was probably Yoko Ono's 1962 Cut Piece, which involved the artist sitting silently on a stage and inviting the audience to cut of here clothing piece by piece with a pair of communal scissors. On the three occasions that Ono staged Cut Piece during the mid-1960s, the audience obliged her each time, in the end leaving the artist sitting on stage wearing little more than scraps and tatters.

Cut Piece is an often-cited work in its own right. Critics often speak of how the piece addresses gender dynamics and how these dynamics play out in terms of social power and status. But in a broader context, one could argue that it ultimately points to an interrogation of the codes of conduct in a supposedly polite society, one which eventually (or hopefully) leads to a critique of the nature of socialization itself. ²

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7.

On the morning of January 5, 1973, Chris Burden walked out onto a beach near the runways of LAX and fired several shots from a revolver at a 747 as it flew overheard. Burden later explained that the piece was about "impotence," since he knew in advance that the bullets would fall short of their target. Impotence in this case meaning bold but futile gestures, the inadequacy of human agency in the face of the grander scheme of things.

Still, unsurprising to learn that the FBI showed up on his doorstep with some questions about the incident a few days afterwards.

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8.

Apparently it's not an easy task getting Chris Burden to talk about his early work. He was never the most "verbal" of people in the first place. Plus, for some years now, he only allows interviews on a conditional basis -- that condition being that only a select few interviewers are allowed to ask him about him about his early career. There are lots of valid reasons for having that kind of policy. The first being that it's got to be tedious always being asked about the same things over and over again. Another being that all of that work was done decades ago, and the artist had long ago moved on to other things.

Yeah, pieces like Shootmade him famous and much of it remains controversial to this day. But that sort of thing has its downside. Such as having Genesis P-Orridge, some years later, bragging in an interview about a COUM performance piece in which he and Cosey Fanni Tutti supposedly cut each other with razors and rolled around in all variety of each other's bodily fluids, boasting that the piece's main claim to success was that it made it made Chris Burden walk out in exasperation and disgust. Or maybe, over the course of many years, having heard about countless art students doing visceral, "shocking," yet ultimately empty performance projects for their graduate theses, each time claiming Burden as a source of inspiration.

It's a lot to have to disassociate oneself from. It also demonstrates how the whole "anxiety of influence" thing can run two ways.

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9.

For 1973's Through the Night Softly, Burden sprinkled broken glass across a fifty-foot expanse of a parking lot located alongside a main drag in downtown Los Angeles. He then stripped down to his skivvies, clasped his hands behind his back, and proceeded to crawl across the glass-strewn pavement on his belly, gradually inching his way forward by rolling and rocking from side to side. The only audience for the occasion was whatever passersby happened to be strolling the avenue that evening. Burden had an associate film the action with a 16mm camera.

Shortly after staging Through the Night Softly, Burden bought 10-second blocks of advert time on a local station in Los Angeles. In these slots, over the course of several weeks, he ran a brief excerpt from the filmed documentation of the piece. There, going out over the airwaves somewhere during the late night or early morning hours, up popped a brief title-card intro identifying the piece, followed by a clip of Burden worming his way over a bed of broken glass. One can only imagine the confusion of the late-night viewer, seeing such a sight between ads for dandruff shampoo and a K-Tel mail-order collection of "THE BIGGEST HITS BY TODAY'S TOP ARTISTS!" Somewhere amid the signal-to-noise equation of television's symbiosis of entertainment and commerce, Burden had inserted an incongruous and incomprehensible factor.³

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10.

Burden would later say that he ran his TV ads because he "always wanted to be on television." Which is perfectly understandable when you consider that the 1970s marked the point that the first American generation to be raised on TV -- the generation for whom television was an integral part of their experience -- reached adulthood and became the mainstream of society.

This also explains why Marshall McLuhan was still an intellectual hot topic at the time. McLuhan, of course, had been the obscure Canadian academic who dared to point out that television was more than some magic box that offered pleasant distractions interspersed with the occasional bursts of information. Instead, he'd delved into analysis of TV's role in the expanding realm of electronic mass media, arguing that television was part of the long evolution of human communications. Far from being just some mod-con appliance, television's role as a mass-consumed medium meant that it was reshaping society -- radically altering people's perceptions of the world and their place in it.

Admittedly, these days it's not that difficult to look back on many of McLuhan's theories and shrug them off, or -- as many have done -- prove them wrong in the light of recent psychological or sociological studies. But McLuhan was a bit like Sigmund Freud is a number of ways. Yes, like Freud he can easily be proven wrong or mistaken on a number of counts. But like Freud, he was the first to venture into territory that many once thought dodgy or esoteric. And also like Freud, he came up with a number of theories in the course of his analysis that -- even after the theories themselves have been dismantled or dismissed -- still provide a rich and useful set of conceptual metaphors.

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Poem for L.A., TV Ad, 1975

11.

One of the things that McLuhan had pointed out was that the world as people knew it was effectively shrinking. Recent technological developments in mass communications and high-speed travel were bringing about a state of temporal-spatial compression -- collapsing the world's separate cultures and far-flung places into the domain of what he termed the "global village."

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TV Hijack, 1972

12.

Television casts a legitimizing gaze, so all TV is more or less "reality TV" in the end. Marshall McLuhan and Daniel Boorstin were among those who recognized this fact early in the game. Richard Nixon learned this the hard way in 1960, as did those in the Pentagon as Vietnam became "the television war" later in the decade. The same applies for the handful of Yippies who sought to hack the TV airwaves, as well as the proponents of "guerilla TV" who argued that public-access cable was a grass-roots alternative to corporate monopolizing of the broadcast spectrum. Likewise for Pat Robertson and a number of other televangelists who jockeyed to acquire airtime throughout the 1960s. Additionally for the more savvy of the era's aspiring terrorists like the Symbionese Liberation Army, who kidnapped-heiress-turned-accomplice Patty Hearst described as "media freaks" during her 1976 trail. And also Christine Chubbuck, the lonely and despondent news anchor who -- during a morning broadcast on a station in Florida in 1974 -- committed suicide by blowing her brains out on live TV.

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13.

"...If I had invited NBC to Shoot, I would have had no control. [Which] reminds me of this T.V. program from which a producer called me up and said: 'Chris, we will do anything for you blah, blah, blah!' I said to them: 'OK, I want 30 seconds of your advertising time.' And they replied: 'No! Impossible!' It was absurd. They conceived of me as Alice Cooper -- a big spectacle."

– Chris Burden, 1999 interview

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14.

In the Global Village, information travels faster and further. The same goes for images, be they from the streets of Saigon or the battlefronts of Biafra. With this newfound connectedness, the problems and conflicts of the world suddenly seem less remote and have more far-reaching affects.

Take terrorism, for example. Up to the late 1960s, Americans had very little concept of, let alone experience with, terrorism. Previously, terrorism was something that happened elsewhere -- the IRA, ETA, the bombings of the Parisian "café wars" being carried out between rival Algerian rebel factions, etc. As far as Americans had been concerned, it all had something-or-other to do with geopolitical struggles and the shrinking of former colonial empires; all very Old World and Third World, not something they had to worry about or bother to understand.

But that began to change in 1968 when the American commercial travel industry was hit by a sudden upsurge of airline skyjackings. Over the five years that followed, airline hijackings were an almost daily (sometimes twice-daily) occurrence. Flights rerouted to Havana or elsewhere. Televised news reports featuring masked gunman, headcounts of the hostages taken, the chronicling of demands and negotiations, the dispatching of tactical units and snipers. Up to the point that the Federal Aviation Administration belatedly installed new airport security measures in 1973, the spectacle of airline hijackings would be an integral facet of modern American life.

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15.

Nearly twenty years later, art and terrorism would surface as thematic tropes in Don Delillo's 1991 novel Mao II. At one point in the novel, the character Bill Grey contemplates his place as writer amidst the political and historic turbulence of the contemporary world:

"For some time now I've had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game."  
"Interesting. How so?"
"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."
"And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."
"I think the relationship is intimate and precise insofar as such things can be measured."

Interviewed shortly after the novel's publication, Delillo elaborated:

"...In a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act. People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power. People who are powerless make an open theater of violence. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to."

It's been said (though I forget by whom) that every work of art is ultimately a glorified failure, is in some way or another testament to the author or artist's efforts to reach an envisioned goal. Perhaps this is partly what Joseph Conrad had in mind when he said that writing in English was akin to flinging mud at a wall. Or one aspect of what Chris Burden meant when he said that 747 was about impotence.

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Bed Piece, 1972

16.

When Burden was about twelve years old, the story goes, his parents separated and his mother took Chris and his brother away to the island of Elba. At some point in their residence on the island, Chris's foot was crushed in an accident. The accident left him bedridden for roughly nine months during his recovery, isolated from the rest of his family, and frequently surrounded by caregivers who spoke a language he didn't understand. He later claimed this was a deeply significant experience of his formative years.

Admittedly, trying to interpret an artist's work in correspondence with their personal life is always dicey business. But one has to wonder about certain pieces in Burden's early career -- particularly those works that involve the artist lying immobile for long spans of time. Crammed into a locker, lying bolted to the floor between buckets of water and a pair of live wires, lying in an alcove with a written invitation for attendees to use him as a human pin cushion, lying on a shelf just out of view of visitors in a gallery for a full month, lying immobile under a sheet of glass for nearly two day.

Burden would later say that the childhood experience of being stuck in a bed for those many weeks and the pain he experienced at the time were what he frequently drew from for his "durational" pieces -- what helped him put himself into a "mind over matter" state when a piece required it. Meaning that in choosing to execute such a work, he was returning to that point in his childhood -- repeatedly revisiting that initial state of trauma, by volition. This undoubtedly plays heavily into the accusations of "masochism" that some critics leveled at Burden's early work.

Still, at this particular moment in American cultural history when many felt like things were going off the rails and crashing, the condition of trauma was a fairly apt metaphor. Plus, psychiatry was very chic at the time; so lot of people were spending time laying around on couches, continually revisiting the shocks and psychic wounds from their earlier years.

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17.

The early works of Chris Burden have often summoned comparisons to the stories of Franz Kafka. Most obvious is how the artist's public feats of endurance, deprivation, and endangerment bring to mind Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." Then there are the pieces that suggest torture and self-mutilation, which might be discussed in relation to the punishment sequence from Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," as filtered through a Foucaultian discussion of the "micro-politics of power" whereby the inscribed-on-the body punishment becomes a corporeal metaphor about the human body as "site" or locus for the internalization of socially repressive and coercive processes. Or something to that effect.

But there's another element of Kafka that turns up in the work as well -- the element of absurdity. The absurdity of The Trail, and of its introductory parable "Before the Law." Case in point: Burden's Doomed, which took place Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in April of 1975. Burden's matter-of-fact description of the piece ran thusly:

My performance consisted of three elements: myself, an institutional wall clock, and a 5' x 8' sheet of plate glass. The sheet of glass was placed horizontally and leaned against the wall at a 45 degree angle; the clock was placed to the left of the glass at eye level. When the performance began, the clock was running at the correct time. I entered the room and reset the clock to twelve midnight. I crawled into the space between the glass and the wall, and lay on my back. I was prepared to lie in that position indefinitely, until one of the three elements was disturbed or altered. The responsibility for ending the piece rested with the museum staff, but they were unaware of this crucial aspect. The piece ended when [a museum employee] placed a container of water inside the space between the wall and the glass, 45 hours and 10 minutes after the start of the piece. I immediately got up and smashed the face of the clock with a hammer, recording the exact amount of time which had elapsed from beginning to end.

By "unaware of this crucial aspect," what Burden meant was that he had delineated the guidelines for the piece in a set of instructions, instructions that he had sealed in an envelope but didn't share with museum staff until the work's completion. The museum staffers had the ability to intervene and end the piece at any point, but were kept unaware of the fact.

And as it turned out, Burden hadn't thought that it would take them so long to act. At most, he expected Doomed would wind up last a few hours. In an interview given some years later, Burden said that as the hours ticked by and the work began to stretch towards its third day, he realized his miscalculation and began to wonder if the attendees were going to continue to stand back and leave him to die.

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18.

One critical reading of some of Chris Burden's early work -- especially a work like Doomed -- was that it all, on some level, had to do with American involvement in Vietnam. With the violence and futility of that involvement, of the culture of public protest than sprang up around it, and of the waning of the anti-war movement in the early 1970s. Burden's theater of self-directed cruelty, the argument went, put the viewer in a moral double bind, making them complicit in an atrocity exhibition. In that respect, Burden's work had less in common with "happenings" and performance art, and more in common with the politicized activities of the Living Theater and other such "guerilla theater" troupes of the 1960s.

Or so one theory had it. There are critics who've argued to the contrary, claiming that Burden's work has no socio-political subtext. Burden himself hasn't helped matters, choosing to only discuss the small and basic ideas behind his works, rarely acknowledging any type of Broader Social Context.⁴

And yet, too many of his works seem to thematically parallel the culture of the time. So which is it?

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19.

Small wonder that after Doomed, Burden didn't feel like doing any more similar "durational" pieces where he bodily put himself at the mercy of his audience. Instead of his expected stuntwork, in the years that followed Burden did a number of more conceptual and metaphorical works that addressed the institutional workings of the artworld itself -- critiquing the economics of the art market, the nature of the value bestowed on artworks themselves, and the like.

It's no small coincidence that Burden started doing these works at the time that was starting to become famous for the work he'd been doing in the first half of the decade; becoming recognized as a Significant Artist of the Era, with museums and top-tier galleries now bidding to commission his next work. For one of the works, Burden recorded and then made public his backroom negotiations between his gallery reps, in another he oversaw the counterfeiting of money. At one point in the 1980s, he demanded a commission to cover a million dollars' worth of gold bars, which he then exhibited stacked as a pyramid, which in turn required the gallery to double security and insure the show for an unprecedented sum.

So Burden wasn't taking a bullet or setting himself on fire for art, anymore. But in some ways these new pieces are just as perversely self-effacing, if not self-destructive, in that it's almost as if the artist were trying to make certain art institutions regret their decision of seeking his services in the first place.

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20.

By the end of the 1970s, Burden was gravitating towards making another form of sculpture -- primarily installational works. A fair number of these artworks had to do with the subject of war, specifically with the American military-industrial complex of the latter Cold War years. Most notably, there was 1979's The Reason for the Neutron Bomb. It was inspired by a bit of anti-Soviet propaganda that had widely circulating, a claim that the Soviets had a force of 50,000 tanks enforcing its border in Eastern European buffer zone (reputedly more than twice that of U.S., European, and NATO forces combined). The number seemed incomprehensible -- if not dubious -- to Burden, so he decided to try and reproduce this "tank gap" on a micro- scale. At first he thought of hiring a toy company to cast a set of 50,000 miniature tanks for the piece; but finding the cost far too prohibitive, he instead settled for the roughest of facsimiles by using matchsticks and coins.

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21.

As with most artists, there are a number of themes than run throughout the full array of Chris Burden's work. One of these themes evolved out of Burden's fascination with the fundamental laws of physics -- an area of interest he'd harbored since childhood. Perhaps his most famous work of this sort was 1979's The Big Wheel. The piece consists of a motorcycle with it rear tire propped up to engage a 3-ton cast-iron flywheel. A couple of times each day, the artist or some museum staffer comes in to start the bike, gradually revving it into full throttle over the course of two minutes or so, thus setting the larger wheel rotating. The roar of the cycle's engine nearly deafens in the enclosed space; followed by the spinning of the flywheel, which practically whispers as it takes several hours to slow to a stopping point.

Coincidentally, 1979 was also the year that the CIA devised a plan to provoke the Soviets into invading Afghanistan by covertly providing funds and training to anti-governmental forces in the Afghan Mujahideen. On learning of the operation, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was enthused and told President Jimmy Carter that the plan -- if successful – would present "the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war." The strategy was quickly put into place, and met with the desired result. Once set into motion, some things take their own momentum, and their own time to wind down.

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1. Burden wasn't the first or only artist to execute such work at the time. His was generally filed under the emergent subcategory of "body art," a trend that some critics regarded as a largely West Coast Thing. As with Burden's own "human sculpture" rationale, "body art" was intended as an artistic strategy for short-circuiting (or at least by-passing) the rigidly formalistic and subject-object relationships that were so endemic in Minimalism's reductivism and "aesthetics of presence."

2. Admittedly, the standard feminist reading of Cut Piece is a bit slippery in some respects. In terms of the relation between performer and audience, one could argue that Yoko Ono not only presented herself to the audience as a woman, she also presented herself as the artist Yoko Ono. It could also be pointed out that the gender-specific reading of the work is largely circumstantial, since Ono later stipulated that re-enactments of the performance could be stages with either a male or female sitter (and even pat one point proposed a version of the piece where audience members performed the action on each other).

With a piece like Shoot, Burden extended an invitation to his audience as well -- that invitation often being little more than to be at a certain place at a certain time. Beyond that, one could argue that he then took the theatrical dynamic in an opposite direction from that of Ono's, in that the piece suggested the ways in which the audience's inactivity constituted an (chosen, accepted) activity in itself.

3. It might not need pointing out that at the time, restrictions on violent content for network television were extensive. Anything of the graphic quality of Burden's film would've normally only been reserved for the national evening news, and even then only sparingly.

4. Exceptions have been rare. Burden did admit, many years after the fact, that the events at Kent State had given him the initial that would lead to Shoot.

Look at Stars (Fall Breaks and Back to Winter)

2011-10-29T13:53:00.001-04:00

Did this one a little while back but sat on it for a while, undecided as to whether it merited posting, until I decided wtf. Another one of those strung-together jawns, compressed mix of some (only some) tracks that I'd been listening to over the past 6 to 8 months. Some recent releases as well as a few artists with varying degrees of history, and an odd allotment of style to be found amidst the entire batch. So have at it, if you're so inclined.

~~::: DL :::~~

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tracklist

01 Wagon Christ - 'Chunktothy'
02 Kelis - 'Milkshake (Shlohmo Remix)'
03 FaltyDL - 'Mean Streets, Pt. 1'
04 Teeth - 'Shawty'
05 Radiohead - 'Bloom (Harmonic 313 Rmx)'
06 Insta:Mental - 'Waterfalls'
07 Martyn - 'Masks'
08 Gun Selektah - 'Poppin' Wheelies (HxdB Rmx)'
09 Grace Jones - 'Devil Dub'
10 Roots Manuva - 'Get to Get (Breakage Rmx)'
11 Boxcutter - 'Allele'
12 James Blake - 'Air and Lack Thereof'
13 West Norwood Cassette Library - 'Ms Fingers (Quantec Rmx)'
14 Cosmin TRG - 'Magnetic Bodies'
15 2562 - 'Aquatic Family Affair'
16 SBTRKT - 'Look at Stars'
17 LV & Joshua Idehen - 'Last Night'
18 Burial - 'Stolen Dog'

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Nobody Here (The Marinettis Bring Home a Computer)

2011-10-27T12:38:00.003-04:00

So, after months of wanting to read it and sounding off on the topic myself, I only recently got around to reading Simon's Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. Thoroughly enjoyed it, of course. Simon's book covers its topic from a variety of angles, and offers a lot to mull over. Far too much to go into here, actually. But I might have a point or two to address.

But one surprise, for me, was the few pages devoted to highlighting the artist Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin) in the early stretch of the book. I'd long been taken with Lopatin's music, but am even moreso now that I learn about Lopatin and the ideas that inform his music. Quoting from the book:

"...Yet the speed of technological advance means that each beloved machine is rendered obsolete with ruthless rapidity. With individuals and businesses throwing out info-tech every two to three years, obsolete computers are a huge environmental problem. ...'I'm super into the idea that that the rapid-fire pace of capitalism is destroying our relationships to objects. All this drives me back, but what drives me back is a desire to connect, not to relive things. It's not nostalgia.' He argues that the idea of 'progress' itself is driven by the economic imperatives of capitalism as by science or human creativity. In a 2009 manifesto-like article, he decries the fixation on linear progress, proposing instead the opening up of 'spaces for ecstatic regression. ...We homage the past to mourn, to celebrate, and to time travel.'"

The cited article, "synthemas and notes 1", can be found here and it offers a deeply interesting read. As a manifesto-ish text, it provides an explanation as for a specific semantics of sound. Lopatin begins by describing his attraction to synthesizers, particularly those of a certain vintage, due to their sonic capacity for suggesting "allegorical landscapes." This ability, he states, is the result of the instrument's own limitations -- the "grain" of its sound being the product of the instrument "striv[ing] and fail[ing] at mimetic representation." The act of creation becomes the act of exploring the abilities (but chiefly the limits and flaws) of the gear's "closed-circuit universe." "The more you enjoy process, limitation and defeat," he muses, "the more potential there is for chance and adventure."

The idea or aim of achieving any degree of originality in this process isn't a factor, since the notion of originality is little more than a threadbare modernist notion, a notion that too often is found riding shotgun with the problematic idea of dynamic and relentless progress. "If our generation can be defined artistically in a single way," he offers:

"It is that of the collector-archivist. We are naturally disposed towards nostalgia, and deep freeze cultural informatics is our greatest cybernetic feat. To understand the euphoria and confusion of my generation is to loop the part of Bill & Ted’s in which Beethoven rips a decisively Steve Vaiesque guitar solo on a synthesizer, and thus we intrinsically understand the nature of the eternal rip."

The reasons for doing so being that:

"The lessons of the past are moments in time that are eternally engaged, and the ability to transmit and interact with ~previous systems~ is evidence of the deep melancholy which arises from our inability to stop time just long enough to experience it."

Which perhaps sounds a bit bleak to some, if not like conceding aesthetically bankruptcy in the face of a cultural/creative impasse -- endlessly staring back down the avenue that led to a certain "postmodern" dead-end. About which I have some further thoughts, but they'll have to wait for another post.

The rain, it raineth...

2011-10-25T11:31:00.002-04:00

Dog Faced Hermans, live in Lincoln, NE, 1994. Full show in a single hour-plus clip. Same kind soul that recently uploaded it also up'd this other one, captured in Brussels the same year.

That is all.

That's No Moon...

2011-10-21T11:05:00.006-04:00

Fortunately, Owen Hatherley's a prolific blogger and writes for numerous online publications. I've long been curious about his two books on architecture, but they're not the sort of thing that circulates very widely here, on account of the fact that they're very British/Euro in focus -- be it his revisionist take on Brutalism, or his attack on generic contemporary urban architecture. The latter being his book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Thing is, the critical thrust of the latter isn't an exclusively U.K. phenom, since the sort of architecture he critiques has (it seems) become something of a new International Style. The glimmering yet soullessly homogenized buildings that seem to be going up in (if not glutting) every middling/large city -- not just here in the U.S. or in Britain, but many other places as well.

I gathered this scenario was much more common that I reckoned a while back when I was checking the traffic to a particular recent post of mine. The post had generated an unusual (for this humble blog) amount of hits and linkage. One link went to a blog written by someone hailing from a town in Portugal, where the author could relate to the very thing I was talking about.

I lived in Chicago for the better part of 16 years. In that span of time, I watched the city "turn around" in some respects; with certain parts of the city being developed to the point of being unrecognizable from how I'd know them during the 1990s. This became especially true as the housing bubble began to emerge back around the beginning on the Noughties. River North, Printers Row, Fulton Market, Greektown, and many other neighborhoods sweeping with generic boutique-y rows of shops, filling up with blocks and high-rises of bland and blocky "luxury" condominiums. In some cases, I suddenly found it difficult to navigate or orient myself in places I'd previously known quite well, because all the landmarks had been erased or were obscured by high rises.

In some instances, these new (over)built environs felt downright oppressive. A not-uncommon plan for some blocks of condos -- wedged into this or that span of street -- was to a multi-level parking deck for the residents, with the Lego luxury abodes stacked atop. Thing is, city ordinances reputedlym dictated that these parking levels had to be walled in, could not be open. So as you walked along a row of one of these things, you'd face a solid concrete wall extending up about 2-3 stories running down the length of the street. A dingy chasm, effectively -- dwarfing, alienating, drab. (I believe once upon a time, the popular word for this sort of effect was "dehumanizing.")

Which brings us to the song above, up there in the Youtube clip. Wifey and I caught the Country Teasers back in 2006 when they hit the U.S for their The Empire Strikes Back tour. They trotted out this tune ("Mos E17ley"), and it immediately became something of a recurring trope in our lives. Inevitably we'd find ourselves driving or walking through a neighborhood like those described above, and one of us would mutter, "This place...is like the fuckin' Death Star."

This too shall pass...

2011-10-14T11:14:00.003-04:00

Simon recently popped up with a few stray thoughts on the passing of Steve Jobs, which I found amusing because I'm more-or-less of the same mind on the matter.

Somewhat more interesting was this piece at The Contrarian. Or at least potentially interesting, since unfortunately it's a bit of tease; a wind-up followed by...the author directing the reader to read some New Yorker article that requires a subscription. Still, the author gets at an interesting contradiction that rests at the heart of the Jobs legacy. That being: The whole Zen idea of technologically-enabled impermanence and intangibility -- the dematerialization of music, books, etc. -- versus the fact that what Jobs & co. ultimately excelled at was getting everyone hooked on gadgets that were constantly being rendered obsolete in the ever-escalating turnover of upgrades and next-gen models. Because really, I think we can all be certain, despite what some parties would have us believe, that the path to Enlightenment isn't paved by slavish consumerism.

Which is an odd legacy to have, particularly since we're talking about someone who was of "a certain generation." So to with the whole i- angle -- the tech-enabled culture of solipsism/autism that Simon points towards in the latter half of his own post.

- sent from my iPhone™

Ritual (Interlude)

2011-10-12T10:41:00.001-04:00

Ingram Marshall: "Gambuh I" for Balinese flute, synthesizer & tape delay (1975).

{ via Rootblog. }

TV Party Tonight

2011-10-07T13:19:00.026-04:00

One,two,three,four!!...

What was the deal with Quincy punx? That was something of a har-har subcultural meme in the punx community for many years. Personally, I thought the CHiPs punx were underrated. They provided way more bang for the blitheringly paranoid youthsploitation buck. Quincy punx largely kept their mayhem indoors, with the confines of their punk-rock clubs and whatnot...

But the ChiPs punx took it to the next level. The ChiPs punx being a band called Pain, who had a song about how they "dug" pain, which was effectively their anthem, if only because it seemed to be the only song they'd been able to come up with. But anyway, they played the song on some rooftop, then hurled a perfectly good guitar over the side into the traffic below, causing all sorts of multi-vehicular chaos. This is more than petty mischief, it's wanton and malicious destruction, because punx love that type of stuff. They meant it, man.

Well wudduya know, it looks like some kind soul has recently down the excavation upped some clips...

Teevee is so educational. Y'see, that right there is why the Elks Lodge Massacre had to happen. Punx got no respect for nuthin'. Which is why they merited a belated expose' on the pioneeringly sociological carousel that was the Donahue show. Philthy phucking Phil Donahue punx, ladies and gentlemen...

And now that I see this again for the first time nearly 30 years, I'm reminded that the Donahue show was shot in Chicago. But this isn't the edition I remember seeing. The one I remember seeing must've been earlier, because it wasn't as boring and it involved a buncha West Coast punx, and at one point Phil read some of the lyrics to "Nazi Punks Fuck Off," and then some woman in the audience stood up and went on an obnoxious screed about how she'd been a "flower child" in the Sixties and had tuned in, turned on & dropped out & all of that, but if one of her kids came home looking like that then she'd have to THROW THEM OUTTA THE HOUSE.*

Speaking of such, as far as moral panics were concerned, none of these media punx compared to Dragnet Hippies. Talk about fuckin' menaces to society...

Of course the "Blue Boy" episode is a cult fave, but that's just the narcotics angle. What I'm talking about is the one where Joe Friday and his sideman go up against the seditious radicals & whatnot. Like the one where Joe sits on a discussion panel with a bunch of long-haired upstarts (chaired by a hippie played by Howard Hesseman), and he's the sole representative of "the System" that everyone else on the panel wants to overthrow. Or another episode where they ended up dealing with some kid who was getting involved with some group like the Weathermen or something, and in each instance these episodes ended with a long exposition by Joe or his partner Bill Gannon where they explained to the troublemakers how they were wrong -- that America was great because it was the land of freedom, the type of freedom that allowed (say) someone like them to say whatever they wanted or believe whatever they wanted, and etc etc. Which I guess was supposed to amount some sorta ideological checkmate, with them pointing out some sorta inherent contradiction that those hippies/radicals had yet to recognize or scrutinize in their own muddle-headed thinking about freedom.

And who better to deliver the news than Jack Webb, he being the big Establishment type that he was? Plus the way he'd already proven himself as a first-rate patriot & everything...

But Dragnet appropriately enough, went off the air in 1970. And it was odd to see Jack Webb, being the big law & order sort that he was, turn up again later in the decade as the man behind Project UFO...

The show was apparently based on the files of the USAF's Project Blue Book. It followed two Air Force investigators as they traveled the country investigating various sightings and close encounters. Each episode was based on some reported sighting and the Air Force's investigation, and each episode ended the same way -- with the agents debunking the sighting, offering a thorough explanation to the witnesses what it was they actually saw and mistook for an alien spacecraft. The show was solidly pro-Federal and might as well have been called The Swamp Gas Files, and it seemed a really bizarre stretch for Jack Webb considering the more pedestrian, no-bullshit ground he'd covered previously. But when you factor the prior Commies-under-every-bed/Red Scaremongering/John Bircherite business into the equation, perhaps it wasn't such a stretch after all.

Still, not sure Jack Webb decided to choose this particular vehicle to get his pro-Establishment message across. Conspiracy theories about Roswell and Hangar 18 were still fairly marginal at the time, and wouldn't go "mainstream" until some time in the next decade. Perhaps it just fit in with more general tenor of TV and popular culture in the early-mid 1970s -- all the TV special dealing with unexplained phenomena like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, and all the stuff about psychic activity with Uri Geller bending spoons with his mind and some other guy who could project pictures of faraway places into camera telepathically, intermixed with Carlos Castaneda or Edgar Cayce type stuff about astral projection or whathaveyou. And lots of things about UFOs, especially connected to Erich von Däniken and Chariots of the Gods and the other books he cranked that all had to do with ancient astronauts and their early interventions with the Egyptians, and the Mesopotamians, and the Olmecs and Toltecs and all the other early civilizations...

Sure, it was all very Mondo Cane. Being a kid at the time, I naturally found all of this stuff absolutely fascinating. It all fit right in with an 8-year-old boy's steady diet of Marvel comics, Evel Knieval, and Rod Serling's Night Gallery. Thing is, my allowance (if I even had one at the time) was pretty paltry, so I'm sure I wasn't the primary demographic that all this ad-leveraged programming was targeted to. Which means that grown-ups must've eating this shit as much as I was. Dunno, maybe it had something to do with the proverbial "temper of the times" -- somehow connected with all that post-'60s "alternative spirituality" and proto-New Age hokum. Modern life having changed so much and so rapidly in the preceding years that a lot of people were flummoxed and anxious and uncertain and couldn't tell what was what anymore, and were therefore open to entertaining all kinds of ideas. All bets are off, everything's up in the air.

But as far as the Sixties were concerned, TV was also quick to remind us that there was a good reason for Joe Friday & co were keeping a close eye on those hippies...

Yeah, my parent's generation was the first generation raised on TV, and in the 1970s they entered into adulthood and took the cultural reins. Part of that meant getting out into the world and pursuing a fulfilling and self-realized life in the supposed "Me Decade," which is maybe why I was part of that first generation for whom TV was a babysitter. And add to that we were coming up the third modern generation in which the society at large was phobic about its own offspring.

But back to punx...

Skip to Nashville at the beginning of 1978, which is where me and my mom were living at the time. An early-evening local news broadcast is on the teevee, and towards the end of the report, they have an item about a newsworthy event that was taking place over in Memphis. There was some band from England playing there, a band that epitomized the "punk rock craze" that people had heard about, and some curious folks were going to check out the "punk rock group" and see what it was all about. Cut to shots of the venue, and patrons coming out of the dark to line up at the doors, all of dressed in odd misunderstood approximations of how punx were supposed to look, all of which did actually make me think of Halloween at the time. I guess the anchorpersons thought the same thing, because they grinned and shook their heads bemusedly at the end of the clip.

Turned out the unnamed "punk rock group" was the Sex Pistols, making the Memphis stop on their ill-fated American tour, and the anchors weren't going to say the name on the air...what, it being prime-time/family-viewing hours in what was more or less the Bible Belt. But at any rate, my mother turns to me and asks, "Have you heard of this punk rock thing?" She was the adult who worked at a newspaper, I was the eleven-year-old who'd been stuck in some backwoods Southern Baptist school over in the next county -- how was I supposed to have heard of any "punk rock thing"? I shook my head to the negatory. She tells me, "It's this thing where the kids take lots of drugs and beat each other up, and they stick pins and needles through their faces." She shook her head is dismay, and added, "The world has just gotten so sick."

Me being eleven years old at the time, naturally I was intrigued. So: Flagged for future reference.

But it'd be roughly another full year before I'd hear any punk-rock music proper. Late at night with some syndicated program on the radio, and the deejay played the Ramones's "Teenage Lobotomy." I was immediately seized by its energy and its brashness, and was jumping and dancing around my room before the first chorus came round. So it was my introduction to something that would factor quite heavily into my teenage years and early adulthood. Maybe the speed and the volume of the music just happened to symbiotically complement the surges of hormones that came with adolescence. Most likely, yeah. But it was more than just that. Seemed like a lot of times, even at its most willfully stupid, the music made much more sense than a lot of the bullshit around me. And yeah, the Eighties were a big decade for bullshit.** Guess it all comes down to the signal-to-noise ratio. What differentiates one from the other, how you filter them, and how the right signal/noise gets transmitted at a time when it amounts to something of significance. ***

n

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* Of course, all of the above is the from 1980s. Media-wise, the rate of cultural dissemination was much slower in those days. American tabloidism was incredibly slow on the uptake about what a goldmine punk would be.

** And sure, I realize that all of the above is drivel, and that it constitutes me breaking my own format. But when you're having a problem with writer's block, you gotta find a way to punch through it; so consider it a freestyling exercise. But hey, this is America (dammit) and it's my blog, so I can do whatever I want.

And in all honesty, I gotta admit...there's gotta be nothing more utterly fucking boring than writing/reading about punk rock, yknow seeing how it's become so deeply enshrined and endlessly documented & yadda. There's very little of it that I listen to anymore, that I ever feel any desire to pull out and revisit. Maybe because so much of it made sense and seemed vital within a certain context, that context being mostly aligned with the Reagan Years.

*** Meaning (I guess) that one could file all such stuff under "culture studies." Which is ultimately a pretty pointless and empty category, if you haven't had pre-req companion courses in history.

Of what use then, but to stop the time?

2011-10-05T12:27:00.002-04:00

Polaroids by Tarkovsky.

{ Via Poemas del río Wang. }

You're on Top of the World

2011-10-04T09:26:00.001-04:00

And here's to an unguilty pleasure.

One of the other contributors to the outboard venue(s) all but commanded me to write something on the topic a while back, and I only recently got around to obliging. And since this is me we're talking about, of course I couldn't keep it short.

A highly subjective take on the matter, I'll admit; but there you have it.

Interlude

2011-09-23T21:02:00.001-04:00

Batteries in need of a recharge.

Afterword

2011-09-18T17:52:00.001-04:00

And really, that last bit originally started out as a short piece on that one Residents album; but then as I started writing other things came to mind...other efforts in other decades that seemed to echo the spirit and sentiment of the artifact at hand. So: The work of three different artists in which, despite all their obnoxiousness and po-mo irony, there's a desolate and sometimes doleful narrative lurking underneath. Or so it always struck my ears. Ultimately, I suppose it has something to do with schizophrenic legacy of the 1960s -- revered by some, deeply reviled by others -- and how it's played out in the culture and the politics ever since.

At any rate, it may be the last I have to say on the 'retromania' matter for a while. Didn't set out to say much about this time, originally; that's just how it developed. As it is, I haven't even had a chance to read Simon's book. But thankfully I was just given a copy for my birthday, so I guess it's time to finally have at it.

Apathy for the Devil

2011-09-16T23:42:00.028-04:00

More outboard riffage. This time a ballooning trio of posts spanning three decades, skipping across a few cultish excursions into "pop satire" and lots of rubbernecking along the road to nowhere. With the Residents, Shockabilly, and Destroy All Monsters driving the tour bus...

:: Part 1 :: Part 2 :: Part 3

I suppose there's a number of tropes that tie this tryptic together which I chose not to go into...a simmering anger that provides a thematic undertow yet never voices itself directly (all that deflecting and effacement via pomo irony & whatnot). Stuff that always struck me like it's trying to summon and expel ghosts with the same hand. All of it with a very definite bleakness and desolation undergirding, no matter how "busy" it might've sometimes sounded on the surface.

Dancing About Architecture, III: Skulptur Haus

2011-09-08T11:25:00.003-04:00

I connection with the earlier Endless House post, dpr-barcelona offers recently posted a brief item on the Sculpture House by Belgian architect Jacques Gillet and sculptor Félix Roulin, built in the city of Liège in 1967-1968. The author draws the obvious parallels to the proposed "Endless House" by Frederick Kiesler, as well as to a couple of somewhat similar designs conceived by the Archigram group.

Aside from this paper of the design of building of the Sculpture House, information about the career and works of Gillet appears to be a bit scant, but he turns up in connection with Friends of Kebyar, an international network of designers centered around the practice of "organic architecture." The organization was previously based in (unsurprisingly) Denver, CO and in Oklahoma, but appears to have more recently transplanted to (huh) the Atlanta, GA area, and infrequently publishes a journal.

A gallery of recent interior and exterior photos of the Sculpture House taken by architecture photographer Åke E:son Lindman can be viewed here. There's also some additional information about it here. (As with the link above, it appears that most of the current research into the history of the house traces back to Stephanie Van de Voorde, a recent doctoral student at the Ghent University Department of Architecture and Urban Planning.)

Towards an Aesthetics of Entropy, Part II

2011-09-06T18:44:00.005-04:00

Returning to where we left off a ridiculously long while ago. And in the same location, in the newly-sprawling suburbs of New Jersey of the mid 1960s...

It was the suburbs of New Jersey that the aspiring artist Dan Graham found himself in 1965, having moved back in with his parents after a short-lived attempt at running his own art gallery in New York City. Alighting there and trying to figure out his next move, Graham roamed the surrounding community and its streets with his Kodak Instamatic, taking tightly-composed snapshots of the middle-class subdivisions that were sprouting up to fill the landscape. Acres of tract homes, identical in design, lining the streets like rows of boxes, block after block. The resulting photos would finally appear in the pages of the 1966 year-end issue of Arts magazine. Bearning the title "Homes for America." These photos were imbedded in an accompanying text that Graham had also supplied. Inconspicuously wedged in between other features and art reviews, the article read like a stray fragment from a real estate trade publication:

Each house is a lightly constructed 'shell' although the fact is often concealed by fake (half-stone) brick walls. Shells can be added or subtracted easily. [ ... ]

Each block of houses is a self-contained sequence -- there is no development -- selected from the possible accepted arrangement. As an example, if a section was to contain eight houses of which four model types were to be used, any of these permutational possibilities could be used:

AABBCCDD ABCDABCD
AABBDDCC ABDCABDC
AACCBBDD ACBDACBD
AACCDDBB ACDBACBD
AADDCCBB ADBCADBC

Running several pages in length, the "article" continued...

"...This serial logic might follow consistently until, at the edges, it is abruptly terminated by pre-existent highways, bowling alleys, shopping plazas, car hops, discount houses, lumber yards, or factories.

... Although there is some probably some aesthetic precedence in the row houses which are indigenous to many older cities along the east coast, ... housing developments as an architectural phenomenon are peculiarly gratuitous. They exist apart from prior standards of 'good' architecture. They were not built to satisfy individual needs or tastes. The owner is completely tangential to the product's completion. His home isn't really possessable in the old sense; it wasn't designed to 'last for generations;' and outside of its immediate 'here and now' context it is useless, designed to be thrown away. Both architecture and craftsmanship as values are subverted by the dependence on simplified and easily duplicated techniques of fabrication and standardized modular plans."

Presented like copy lifted directly from a brochure picked up at an industry trade show, "Homes of America" operates as a canard. Doubly so, when you account for the way Graham's text -- with its discussion of simplified forms and standardized modularity -- often paralleling the measured, methodical rhetoric of many artists' tracts and statements of its day, especially that connected with the then-emerging Minimalist movement. Take, for example, Donald Judd's essay "Specific Objects," published in the Arts Yearbook in 1965:

"Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors – which is riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface. Obviously, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can have any relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms or exterior or none at all. Any material can be used, as is or painted."

Or from Robert Morris's "Notes on Sculpture," circa 1966...

"A simple, pure sensation cannot be transmissible precisely because one perceives simultaneously more than one property as parts in any given situation: if color, then also dimension; if flatness, then texture, etc. However, certain forms do exist that, if they do not negate the numerous relative sensations of color to texture, scale to mass, etc., do not present clearly separated parts for these kinds of relations to be established in terms of shapes. Such are the simpler forms that create strong gestalt sensations."

Graham's "Homes for America," in its own ingeniously resourceful way, epitomizes a major shift in art that had taken place in the late 1950s and early 1960s -- that it's a prime example of the postmodern closing of the gap between art and everyday life; of an artist responding to his or her present-day "common culture." But steering things closer to the topic at hand, it also serves as a pertinent companion piece to -- if not an inspirational source for -- Robert Smithson's "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," which was published in Artforum magazine at the end of the following year.

* * * * * * * *

The 1960s were something of golden age for artists' texts. It was a time in which, for perhaps the first time since the early part of the century -- that period of the aesthetic manifestoes and bombast of early High Modernism -- that an artist's statement of purpose or theoretical ramblings carried significant weight. To some degree, this new situation mostly came about by default. In the wake of recent developments and shifts, traditional art criticism was lagging behind the times, and there was a breech to fill.

The short version: Modernist art and the supremacy of painting and other traditional media had reached the end of an evolutionary arc. Pollock and de Kooning and their fellow travelers had (by some accounts) punched their way out of the conundrum of Cubist spatiality, and in doing so had brought one chapter in the book of art history to a close. (Sure, there was the "post-painterly abstraction" that followed, but not much of anyone found it anything worth getting terribly worked up about.) In the years that followed, art practices splintered off in a number of directions, with a new generation of young American artists producing works that -- in terms of style and materials and content -- fell outside the domain of conventional accounts. New ways of making art required new ways of looking at it, which required new ways of thinking and talking about it; and the old set of critical tools and concepts and terminology wasn't up to the task. Sure, there were a few younger critics who were able to rise to the challenge, but it seemed that -- with all the criterial slippage that was afoot -- the entire art-crit community was going to have to scramble to catch up.

Which is where a number of the younger artists came in. Unlike their brooding and inarticulate Ab-Ex predecessors, they were pretty savvy when it came to stringing words together and methodically working their way through the whys and whatfors of formalism and aesthetic theory. Judd, Morris, and Smithson proved to be the most verbose and cerebral of the lot, and a number of their writings would become primary documents of the era. Graham's "Homes for America" occupies a unique position in this critical continuum, by dint of being an instance when text becomes an integral part of the artwork itself. As such, it was an indicator of things to come. By the time Conceptual Art emerged on the scene in the latter half of the decade, it became a more common practice to supplying text as works of art on their own.

* * * * * * * *

Smithson in his studio, c. 1960

The early half of the 1960s had been a period of artistic floundering for Robert Smithson, a protracted stretch of casting-about and indecision as he sought to find a way of producing work that was relevant, contemporary, and engaged with big ideas. He'd started out painting, producing canvases that were thick with mythological and religious metaphors and heavily modeled after Byzantine iconic imagery. By 1964, he'd transitioned into a brief quasi-"Pop Art" phase -- acrylic paintings of explosions and bolts of electricity rendered in a flat, emblematic style, and a sculpture involving mirrors and neon.

The following year, Smithson showed up at Dan Graham's short-lived John Daniels Gallery in Manhattan, looking for a new venue to show his work. Through his association with the gallery, Smithson began working his way into the network of gallery's other artists -- artists whose work was then starting to gain a lot of critical attention, artists who would soon be ranked as Minimalism's pioneering figures. Graham later recalled his first impression of Smithson as being of "someone who was trying too hard," explaining:

"He was thought to be someone who was politically muscling in,…although his intellectual ideas about the work were compelling and interesting which made me even more guarded, and also made me even tougher on him as I tried to figure out his 'position.' …Bob was trying to make a connection with the Minimal artists we were showing, because he was very adaptable in terms of influence."

Smithson's "compelling and interesting" ideas concerning the work of his Minimalist contemporaries were very much his own, the product of his own peculiar autodidact erudition. This was very evident in his essay "Entropy and the New Monuments," which was published in Artforum magazine in June of 1966. Among the first of Smithson's ambitious writings, the essay is a loopily eccentric text; enough so that the reader can't help but wonder if it wasn't -- like Graham's "Homes for America" -- intended to be something of an artwork in itself. Dense -- some might say over-reachingly so -- with associations and citations from a variety of disciplines and from popular culture, frequently spiraling off into outer-orbit tangents, the text demonstrated Smithson's affinity for connecting far-flung ideas and conceptualizing in oblique and esoteric ways.

Ronald Bladen, Three Elements, 1966

With "Entropy and the New Monuments," Smithson presented his own (highly peculiar) reading of the work of the first wave of so-called Minimalist artists -- specifically that of Judd, Morris, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin and a number of other artists, inlcuded those associated with the "Park Place Group" (Mark di Suvero, Robert Grosvenor, at al). Departing from the formalist concerns of Judd and Morris, Smithson foregoes any discussion of "neither painting nor sculpture" or "unitary objects," instead arguing in the essay's opening paragraphs:

"The works ...bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age, and would most likely confirm Vladimir Nabokov's observation that, 'The future is but the obsolete in reverse.' In a rather round-about way, many of the artists have provided a visible analog for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which extrapolates the range of entropy by telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness. ...

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian, as well as being instant."

A few paragraphs later, he segues into an extended aside about the High Modernist architecture of Park Avenue (as epitomized by Philip Johnson), commenting:

"This kind of architecture without 'value of qualities,' is, if anything, a fact. From this 'undistinguished' run of architecture, as [Dan] Flavin calls it, we gain a clear perception of physical reality free from the general claims of 'purity and idealism.' Only commodities can afford such illusionist values…"

"Primary Structures" exhibition, The Jewish Museum, NYC, April 1966

Robert Smithson had little interest in methodically dismantling Greenbergian Modernist formalism, a task that very much preoccupied many of his immediate peers. But like a number of artists at the time, Smithson was intrigued with certain ideas that Mesoamericanist art historian George Kubler had put forth in his 1962 book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. In his book, Kubler had proposed an alternate framework for contextualizing art history; abandoning the traditional linear model for another (somewhat structuralist) approach that involved diffuse cycles -- or "sequences" -- of development, problem-solving, and eventual dormancy or discontinuation. What's more, Kubler offered a continuum that was more openly anthropological in character, broadening the concept of art history to include a society's "material culture" as a whole (if not extending it to include intellectual culture, as well). Kubler's expansive and interdisciplinary approach was destined to appeal to Smithson, bound to appeal to Smithson, who -- still harboring a childhood fascination with natural sciences -- was similarly prone to thinking in trans-epochal historical sweeps, more inclined to think in terms of geologic time rather than that of specific historic or aesthetic moments.¹

It is with the essay's discussion of the element of time (rather than that of formal or spatial concerns) that Smithson most sharply diverges from the theorizing of his peers, and which introduces the essay's core idea -- entropy. By opting for the monument analogy, Smithson effectively likens the "specific objects" or "unitary forms" of the Minimalists to dolmen or stele or obelisks -- to archeological artifacts, of a sort.² Yet, he counters, these works are monuments built "against the ages" -- embodying the material culture and sensibilities of the immediate present, by dent of being products that owe their existence to contemporary manufacturing techniques and synthetic materials.³ It is, by Smithson's reckoning,this degree of temporal hyperattenuation, this narrowing of reference to the point of instantaneity, that he viewed as a manifestation of entropy -- an "energy-drain" or halting of historical momentum, embodying or signifying nothing more than the material values of the present, mute on all matters of what came before or anything that might come after.

Smithson's brief association with Minimalism marked a turning point in his development as an artist. And as the most significant of Smithson's early texts, "Entropy and the New Monuments" illustrates the artistic ideas that Smithson was formulating at the time, and how theses ideas would -- in turn -- soon cause him to veer in an entirely different direction with his own work.

{ End of part two. }

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

1. For instance, when Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood" appeared in the June 1967 issue of Artforum, it drew a number of cranky rejoinders from Donald Judd and others. Smithson wrote his own response, from which it's difficult to tell if he actually bothered to dissect or fully understand Fried's argument. But given his own concerns as artist, the matter's probably neither here nor there, since Smithson seems to have very little (if anything) at stake in the theoretical debate in the first place.

2. The terminology here ("specific objects," "unitary forms") belongs to Donald Judd and Robert Morris, respectively.

3. This assertion of Smithson's curiously parallels an argument that would become something of postmodernist cliché a couple of decades later, the argument being that the history of Modern art and the so-called avant-garde came to an end with the emergence of Pop Art and Neo-Dadaism -- e.g., when "high art" merged with/was overtaken by the popular culture.

On memory and the politics of nostalgia

2011-09-04T09:24:00.004-04:00

"The curious thing is this: although there has been an enormous proliferation of work on memory studies in the last quarter century—not only in English, but also in French, German, and Italian—it seems to me rather strange that no one has really set out to explain why exactly during this particular historical period, from 1980 or so on, there has been such an obsession with memory studies. I don’t think this can be understood via any single factor, but it could possibly be explained by the confluence of three powerful forces coming together. The first could be described as the long shadow of World War II, which continued to exert its impact even as late as the 1990s. Think for example of the celebrations in 1995 of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Another factor in the emergence of memory studies has been what I would call 'transitional justice.' And by that I mean to say that in the 1980s and 1990s there were transformations in various countries—in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, South Africa, in the states of central eastern Europe—that had had a very difficult past, on the whole a totalitarian or authoritarian past, and had moved toward a more democratic form of government. Precisely because they had had a difficult past, they had to take up a position about it, they had to examine their memories. They had to think about what attitude they should take toward the previous perpetrators and victims of injustice. And the final significant factor has been the process of decolonization, which had very significant repercussions—not only for the previous colonizing powers, in particular Britain and France—but also for the previously colonized powers, in particular Africa and India, who have sought, so to speak, to re-appropriate their own memories, whereas for the previous colonizing powers, what has emerged is what might be described as a politics of nostalgia. In fact, the famous three-volume work edited by Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, is an interesting case in this regard because although it is presented as a gigantic and cooperative academic exercise, it seems to me that there is a very powerful undercurrent of nostalgia in that volume."

In the most recent edition of Cabinet and currently up on the publication's website, "Historical Amnesias," an interview with University of Cambridge social anthropologist Paul Connerton. From willed collective & selective suppressions of historical memory, to the acceleration of forgetting in the service of "planned obsolescence," there's a number of fascinating ideas scattered throughout.

Ballet mécanique

2011-09-03T11:24:00.010-04:00

In which synesthesia and reflexive creative subjectivity get cyberized...

"What I’ve built to consider these questions is an interactive robotic painting machine that uses artificial intelligence to paint its own body of work and to make its own decisions. While doing so, it listens to its environment and considers what it hears as input into the painting process. In the absence of someone or something else making sound in its presence, the machine, like many artists, listens to itself. But when it does hear others, it changes what it does just as we subtly (or not so subtly) are influenced by what others tell us."

Not that this sort of thing is without precedence (for instance, A and B), but the audio-responsive element is an interesting twist -- especially considering that a majority of the time the thing is driven by the sounds of its own activity, thereby creating its own feedback loop. Alvin Lucier and Frank Stella and Humberto Maturana are sitting in a room...

This part I expect many can relate to:

"Lately I’ve taken to critiquing the machine as it paints, giving it audio input that is a direct response to what it just did. I’ll tell it what I think of each gesture it paints: if I liked it or didn’t, if I think it should have done something different, or how I see the latest mark fitting into the overall composition of the work. I’ve found that I tend to dislike these paintings more than others it makes, suggesting that listening to a constant critique of one’s creative process may not be productive."

All too human, in the end.

The quasi-Ab Ex look of the work is a bit surprising -- because what was more "postmodern" than the ironic, feigned gesture? But mostly it just comes down to a "gee-whiz" factor, because -- as such things go -- it falls well short of stacking up to the most culturally relevant art installation of the 'Noughties.