Interlude

Batteries in need of a recharge.

Afterword

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

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

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

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

"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

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.

Darkness, Then

Or "Black is the New Black, Volume II." As with the previous edition, featuring an old-to-new ratio — this time leaning more to the latter, since I've been sitting on so much material these past nine or so months. Since I have enough for a third volume already, I figured it was time to get some of it off the desktop. Hastily stitched together as before; but considering the download numbers on part one, I expect some'll find this one just as cozy. Cheers.


::: DOWNLOAD :::

 tracklisting

◼ scanner / 'untitled' / mille plateaux / 1995
◼ pan sonic / 'maa' / blast first / 1999
◼ mordant music / 'olde wobbly' / mordant / 2008
◼ old apparatus / 'untitled' / deep medi musik / 2011
◼ kangding kay / 'pruitt-igoe' / raster-noton / 2010
◼ milton bradley / 'a sky full of numbers' / do not resist the beat! / 2011
◼ lucy / 'tof' / stroboscopic artefacts / 2011
◼ slotek / 'rain - transmutation' / wordsound / 1997
◼ muslimgauze / 'khan younis' / staalplaat / 1993
◼ shackleton / 'undeadman' / honest jon's / 2011
◼ regis / 'blood witness' / blackest ever black / 2011
◼ lucy & xhin / 'lx3' / clr / 2011
◼ demdike stare / 'regressor' / modern love / 2009
◼ senking / 'crevasse' / raster-noton / 2007
◼ murcof / 'memoria' / leaf / 2002