Les fleurs du 'meh'

"The contemporary artist now functioned as a sort of lubricant, as both a tourist and a travel agent of art, following the newly liberated flows of capital while seeming always to be just temping within the nonstop tempo of increasingly flexible, dematerialized projects, always just passing through. This was all vaguely political, too, in a Negrist sort of way that promoted the emancipatory possibilities of connection and communication, linking the new speed of culture to the 'convivial' spirit of everything relational. The mutation of the artist continued to follow its irrevocable logic until we eventually arrived at the fully wireless, fully precarious, Adderall-enhanced, manic-depressive, post- or hyperrelational figure who is more networked than ever but who presently exhibits signs of panic and disgust with a speed of connection that we can no longer either choose or escape. Hyperrelational aesthetics emerged between 9/11 and the credit crisis and so can be squarely situated in relation to the collapse of the neoliberal economy, or more accurately to the situation of its drawn-out living death, since neoliberalism continues to provide both the cause and the only available cure for its own epic failure."

- from "Next-Level Spleen" by John Kelsey

Artforum, September 2012 issue  [ .pdf ]

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Also, in relation to my prior post: Tim Maly at Quiet Babylon with some thoughts about "the Leakiness of Surveillance Culture, the Corporate Gaze, and What That Has To Do With the New Aesthetic."

The Changing Sameness

Just above, a photograph. A photograph that I took the liberty of flipping into black & white. I'm not giving credit to the photographer, which might (or might not) be deemed problematic seeing how the photographer slapped a copyright on the image. Which I can't help but find odd, since the image is a recreation of something someone else did fairly recently, which was itself a twist on something someone else did a good many years before that, which itself was slightly modeled after something that someone else had done far earlier.

The rabbit hole, such as it is, ends there. Perhaps if you were to turn this series of repetitions and permutations into an equation, the equation might run as such: A something being repeated -- the first time as history; the second time as semi-ironic hommage; the third time as highly-ironic parody; the fourth time as utterly fucking pointless, ranking well below a fart in the wind tunnel in terms of cultural significance.

At which point I feel tempted to double back and revisit Lester Bangs's "Who Stole Punk?" spiel for the first time in many years. But instead I was recently thumbing through a copy of Paul Morley's Words and Music for the first time in a long while, a number of things jump out at me, but most particularly this bit, which echoes a common geezerly complaint of recent years...

"The Strokes were great are re-creating moments but not as great at creating moments. They were conservative (they conserved); they weren't radicals (they didn't remake the world). Their music was a tribute to a radical spirit, while missing a radical spirit. Ultimately what was lacking was the sense of newness, the sense of coming-out-of-nowhereness, that gives essentially simple, honest bursts of communication a power beyond the immediate. If Television had not made 'Little Johnny Jewel' in 1975, and we had first heard it in 2000, it would still have been as uncanny a piece of music...but it would have had twenty-five years of other things that have happened to contend with...

If 1949 Charlie Parker had in fact first popped up in 1964, well, it would have been quite arresting but, really, pretty pointless. This is the problem I began to see at my age as rock music began to photocopy itself: what was lacking for me was the suddenness that must be attached to the sound, the suddenness of its appearance and its newness. The suddenness of sound when it sounds like new sound connected to but adrift from other sounds."

At any rate: Some blog-realm cross-chatter blahblah-ing, a few clearing-the-attic thoughts on some things I'd flagged for comment some weeks ago.

One being: Phil's recent yarn on the subject of older music outselling new, but more specifically talking about of eternal returns and revivalism in pop music. I'm intrigued -- unsurprisingly, I suppose -- by his introducing the idea of entropy into the discussion, particularly linking it to bygone notions of progress and dynamic evolution in music. (Yes, we know...postmodernism told us such stuff was a very dubious and distinctly modernist idea, right? Yet we still sort of believe in it, expect it, perhaps even desire it. That suddenness, that newness, that jolt of uncanniness, that creation of a moment.) Simon offers a brief aside musing that sometimes things progress by way of crabwalking -- laterally, sideways, not necessarily in any strictly linear, teleological way. Which may or may not overlap with Phil's later thoughts about change versus "progress" in broader socio-historic terms.

This condition, of course, partly provided the premise for Simon's recent book Retromania. But I say partly because Simon's discussion of the "atemporality" of certain stripes of contemporary pop music ultimately encompassed more; is is many ways bound up with the idea of hyperstasis, having as much to do with the influence of digital culture and the internet -- with its alinear and across-the-board, equal-access-to-everything-at-once character -- rather than the matter of mere sonic stylistic apery and recycling.

Of course, part of Phil's initial post addresses the music's diminished cultural status -- about it no longer being a "driver of youth culture." Which points to how pop music now (and long has been) just one commodity among many; in most cases signifying little more than any other lifestyle accessory, something that long ago spent its own artistic and "cultural capital" through sheer market-glutting, quantity-over-quality overkill.Much of which rings familiar, echoing certain critique about information culture; about how the democratized deluge of facts and opinions ends up being a scenario of one piece of information -- regardless or truth- or use-value -- canceling another out, on and on ad infinitum, resulting in an reciprocal and comprehensive nullification of content or meaning, leaving little but a diffusive pink noise across the spectrum.

And I suppose there's any number of angles one could take to analyze or explain this entropic state of affairs. For instance, extrapolating on stats: the increase of venues of distribution in relation to surplus cultural production and income, the proliferation of channels in an pluralistic media landscape and the increasing splintering and atomization of niche audiences viz market demographics, "narrowcasting," and etcetera, etcetera. Other possible models? Two come to mind, two that have less to do with pop music but (much like that image above) with music's connection with the the larger realm of cultural activity and "creativity"...

First: That of the interpenetration and eminence of design into every realm of cultural and material culture over the past few decades, if not the way it's become the essence of culture (as we now know it) itself. Or as Hal Foster has described: the all-eclipsing "value added" (ugh) manifestations of the "political economy of design," which and the way it bypasses the condition of reification in the ways that it articulates and embodies "subject-less" desire -- reducing its own essence and efforts to an endless perpetuation of cultural production "that is all image and no interiority -- an apotheosis of the subject that is also it potential disappearance."*

The second being a concurrent trend that arose and gather momentum over the same stretch of time -- that of the culture of curation and its accompanying archival impulse, the many ways in which the aesthetic of mixing and re-presentation loomed to the fore. This has not only run parallel to the first aspect but is closely connected as well, due to its obsession with an aesthetics of display and exhibition. And it's the aspect that's mostly responsible for the ouroboric process by which culture operates at present -- consuming and re-presenting itself, without having to signify much of anything outside its own culture-ishness.

The above two points being perhaps a little too tied to discussions of visual culture, as far as the whole matter of critical discourse is concerned. Still, I see them as being part of a similar critical enterprise, one that coincides with the sort of things that both Simon and Phil are addressing; although by different route. And the above probably amounting to little more than me daubing on a wall, a meager attempt at hammer out some thoughts that deserve far more time & space to address.**

At any rate, there are some other things Phil mentioned in his posts, concerning the notion and the nature of progress in all of this. Which is a slippery topic, and one that brings some other ideas to mind; but which will have to wait for another time, a possible part two. (But perhaps done a some point when I'm not so tired, and hopefully more lucid.)

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*  "When Surface Became Depth" was how Michael Bracewell summed up the decade of the 'Nineties. In hindsight, the '90s would seem -- as Warhol would have put it -- "very full," all-too willing and capable of delivering (as far as music was concerned, at least) its share of ecstatic or transcendent moments, compared to much of what has followed in its wake. Yet somehow Bracewell's dismissal has a ring of truth to it, if only because anyone who was paying attention could perhaps notice an underlying emptying-out going on beneath it all...a silence gathering beneath the masking din.

**  Have been busy with other things lately, many of which has been siphoning of time and mental and temporal "bandwidth." Case in point, I think I started this post many weeks ago, and...well, here we are.

The Predicament of Culture (Small Things in a Big Landscape)

"...Actually there's an academic area of study and research devoted to that sort of thing. It's called 'psychoacoustics.'"

What, is that the study for when someone thinks they hear voices in their head?

"Haha, you're cute. But no, it's about the study of how the brain processes sound, the way it receives and interprets it...makes sense of it as sensory input. Some researchers in the field have done things like what you're talking about..."

As far as the 'semantics' of sound are concerned?

"Sort of, I guess...something along those lines. They'll go into some deeply landlocked desert region -- like, for instance, some place in driest parts of Africa -- some place where the locals aren't likely to have experienced large bodies of water. And then they put headphones on them or whatever and play them recordings of the sound of flowing water -- 'babbling brooks' and noisier forms of water -- and they ask them what they make of it. And the answer is usually that the person listening to it can't identify what the sound is, it falls outside their experience, but they find it very pleasant....very soothing, whatever it is."

Sounds absolutely fascinating, I'd love to read some of that. Is there a journal?

"That sort of research isn't typical in the field. It tends to be incredibly dry. The bulk of the literature is deeply esoteric -- extremely technical and academically abstract. Definitely no way to access any of it from a casual, 'layman's' perspective. Even I can't begin to crack the terminology."

Bah!

images: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets series, 2008-2011.

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

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."

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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.


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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.

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

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.

...Versus Getting Away from It (Some Afterthoughts on the Prior Post)

And there are a lot reasons why cinematic treatments of art are often so terrible. One is that seems that the people who write these films don't understand their subject matter, or grossly misjudge how to get it across on film. Usually you get some naively starry-eyed romanticization of it all, or some pathetically misfired attempt at satirizing the artworld and how it supposedly operates. (Or in some instances, a deeply confused combination of the two.) The video above somewhat follows in this latter mould, but unlike most art-related films I can think of, it's actually somewhat enjoyable to watch.


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The parodic gist of the Modeselektor video brings to mind the recent craze for art fairs, since that's obviously what helped inspire the thing. I went to a few art fairs back in the mid-to-late 1990s, and soon decided that I'd be better off avoiding them as much as possible in the future. Little did I know at the time that they were about to become the "wave of the future." And in recent years, a lot of critics and artists and various artworld people have decried the rise of the art fair. Reputedly a lot of gallerists hate them too, but feel that they're a "necessary evil" in keeping their businesses operating and economically afloat.

The Ownership Society, II

"The faux-pas term of the 2000s, intellectual property is nearly impossible to protect. There are only two options left: a police state, or to turn the whole thing off -- to drive tanks into the Ukraine (major server farms such as Tangram are based there) and shut down every single machine. Let's just abandon it now; the idea of intellectual property never helped artists or those on the receiving end anyway, just corporate interests. Richard Prince -- unthinkable today! And the old European business model that grounds the concept doesn't translate well to other cultures. For example, the Chinese language has many words to describe things that are neither copy nor original, some even suggesting that a copy is the more valuable of the two."

- Christian von Borries, Berlin composer, conductor

and filmmaker (in the April issue of Artforum)

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"As in the United States and Europe, a handful of contemporary painters in China can command hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for each of their highly creative works... . But the main push by China has been in the broad market for works that retail for $500 or less, with painters who work from postcards or images on the Internet or, in Mr. Zhang's case, a large, dog-eared copy of an art book in English on van Gogh."

- New York Times, July 15, 2005

photos: Michael Wolf, The Copy Artists, China, 2006

No Accounting for Taste

Via a recent edition of the e-flux journal, Boris Groys on "Art and Money," and the notion that certain kinds of the former exist due to the support of an "elite"...

"Our contemporary world, though, is primarily an artificially produced world—in other words, it is produced primarily by human work. However, even if today’s wider populations produce artworks, they do not investigate, analyze, and demonstrate the technical means by which they produce them—let alone the economic, social, and political conditions under which images are produced and distributed. Professional art, on the other hand, does precisely that—it creates spaces in which a critical investigation of contemporary mass image production can be effectuated and manifested. This is why such a critical, analytical art should be supported in the first place: if it is not supported, it will be not only hidden and discarded, but, as I have already suggested, it would simply not come into being. And this support should be discussed and offered beyond any notion of taste and aesthetic consideration. What is at stake is not an aesthetic, but a technical, or, if you like, poetic, dimension of art."

Groys navigates his argument by way of (perversely enough) two noted essays by Clement Greenberg -- specifically "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and "The Plight of Culture." Admittedly, the piece meanders and gets a bit knotty at times, yet Groys manages to stay fairly on-point in terms of unpacking and demystifying certain misconception about how the artworld supposedly "works." Ultimately, his thesis is has it that it isn't so much monied, bourgeoisie, institutional elites that keep foster or bolster certain types of seemingly esoteric art modes and practices, but rather the judgement and support of the "productivist" elites of artists themselves.¹

This, of course, raises all sorts of theoretical considerations. What interests me more is the more at the issues that fall more squarely in the domain of aesthetics. Specially, the matter of how a given work or art engages an audience, how it expresses or communicates something to someone, and how the canon shapes up in relation to these considerations.

There are "artist's artists," just as there are "musician's musicians," "writer's writers," and so on. Anyone who devotes their time of energy invested in any given area of artistic activity knows this. How a given artist/writer/whatever achieves this status varies, but it often hinges on a specialized knowledge of the matters of craftmanship -- a critique or appreciation based in technical or formalistic considerations.²

For the past 3-4 decades, formalism has taken a consistent bashing, having long since become a dirty (or, at the very least, dismissive) term in critical circles. But I'd argue that any artists that's worth their weight in salt is ultimately a formalist -- whether consciously or innately. They're geared to think in terms of things like color, composition, texture, materials, physical properties, scale, etc. (Effectively, the syntax by which a work communicates with the viewer/audience.) If they're not, then they've pretty much got it all ass-backwards and the likelihood is very high that they're making lousy work -- work that fails to engage or impart anything to the viewer.

Critics factor into this too, naturally. And they're also considered (rather naively) viewed as constituting some sort of powerful "elite" of their own in all of this. But the role of the critic in much of what Groys is addressing is a little more peripheral. There is, I believe, also a fundamental disconnect or a major degree of removal that spereates the judgement of critics from those of producers. Critics and art historians most often tend to think in linear or compartmentalizing terms -- to imposing or applying those types of narratives in terms of situating a work or artist into some context or another. On the other hand, artists (the good ones, anyway) generally have a much more oblique or diffuse way of making connections across a broad range of artworks and cultural artifacts -- connection that are not only visual, but also thematic, materialistic, and critical in nature.

Joseph Bueys stating to an audience that the work of Jackson Pollock was one of the century's greatest artistic achievements; and that if you don't get that, then you don't understand art. Richard Prince responding to an interviewer that if there was one piece of art he'd like to own, it'd be a DeKooning. Gerhard Richter getting all huffy with Benjamin Buchloh when the latter asserted that Richter's smeared abstract paining were ironic postmod corruptions of the authorial gestures of Ab Ex. If you do much reading in the history of contemporary art, you occasionally runs into this sort of scenario. And it never fails to amuse when you encounter them, because they demonstrate the disconnect I mentioned above -- an instance of a critic or historian projecting an aesthetic position on an particular artist, basing their assumption on a readymade or commonly accepted reading of the artist's work. But it's seldomly as simple or limited as that.³

image: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1990

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1. I know, nothing so murky as bring the term/idea of an "elite" (or "elitism") into a discussion. I long ago dropped the term from my own vocab due to its rhetorical bankruptcy. And employing the term "avant-garde" in this day and age is as equally embarrassing and problematic. But since those are the terms Groys uses (if only for the sake of notional shorthand), we'll let them stand for the time being.

2. I realize that this hardly makes for a finalizing, airtight thesis. For instance, over the years I've known more than a few musicians that I thought had (sometimes) lousy taste in music. Reason being that their technical knowledge and ability sometimes drove them to appreciate something merely for technical reasons -- i.e. to bravura and "virtuosity" for its own sake, thus occasionally being taken in by what some would call "vulgar showmanship." Yes, Al Di Meola can play "really fast." Yeah, Maynard Ferguson can play really loudly. And yes, Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto is really complex. And...?

3. As far as the matter of canon-shaping and art practices are concerned, and I also found that the Groys essay touches on topics that turn up (in varying degrees) in this and this item which've crossed by path recently.

Brush Fires in the Social Landscape

Rimbaud in New York, 1977-1979

Untitled (Falling Buffalo), 1989

Fever, 1989

Untitled (Christ), 1988

Over two decades after his art was used by the American right wing to all but kill the National Endowment for the Arts, and 18 years after the artist's own death from HIV, the art of David Wojnarowicz once again serves as a political football in the Culture Wars.

Ugch.

All that time you felt you were only running in place, then you discover that the pavement is now moving under your feet and that you're actually moving backward.

The Anatomy and Architecture of Desire, 1986

Myths of the Near Future

I wasn’t aware that it was time for another edition of the Chicago Manual, already. The Believer co-founder/contributor Ed Park, who reviews the thing by way of a Ballardian exercise of treating reference material as if it were a narrative. Though I believe the actual pay-off is (for once) in the comments.

Speaking of J.G. Ballard, the following quite from the author turned up in an article this past weekend in the Guardian:

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel."

It appeared in a post in which Guardian contributor Damien Walter was arguing for the continued relevance of science fiction as a contemporary literary genre. He writes:

Looking at the television screen, and the surrounding mediasphere, it seems difficult to deny that much of what might once have been real has been displaced by fiction. Fictional conflicts stand at the heart of dramas that help us ignore the truth. [...]

For the last few centuries the realist novel has done little more than find ever more obsessive ways to reflect back at us the comforting fictions we accept as reality, making the contemporary literary novelist merely a second idiot, retelling the tale the first idiot already told. Realist fiction's unquestioning acceptance of modern life makes it difficult for the contemporary literary novel to find anything resembling the truth when it tackles issues of poverty, race, gender, politics, society or philosophy. The easy cop-out of post-modernist relativism beckons.

That last dismissive bit about "post-modernism" is a little too pat, begs for boocoo qualification. Still, I found it intriguing; especially in light of the nascent hubbub about "reality hunger." Right right, we know already: The death of the novel, the obsolescence of same in any "Great American…" context, the oh-so-quaint conceit of thinking that such a thing is even still possible in this pluralistically-minded day & age, and the continued quest for relevant and inclusive narratives in an age of advanced cultural fragmentation and diffusion. All sorts of questions and debates spring up around the notions that Walter insists are imperative and still viable in contempo lit.

But: An "unquestioning acceptance of modern life"? Well, sure…if the wheel was an extension of the foot, just as (some certain cyber-gaga sorts once proclaimed) the internet is an extension of our own synapses or whatever, how can any of the nuances and minutiae of said modern life be encompassed by something so conventional and retrograde as a novel? As if writers of the recent gen haven't grappled with exactly this conundrum. The genre/not-genre of "Hysterical Realism" comes to mind. More specifically, David Foster Wallace’s honkingly hefty and ambitious Infinite Jest, what with all its myriad endnotes, its byzantine and obsessive-compulsive navigations of product descriptions and the chemical ingredients of psychotropic drugs, and a future involving Subsidized Time^™ and absurdist geo-political alliances that includes border disputes carried out with catapulted garbage, and etc. etc.

And along with the idea of Hysterical Realism comes critic James Wood’s reputed gripe, his dismissal that it amounts to nothing more than an abortive literary mode that "knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being." Huh. Funny, considering that just a few years before Wood’s verdict, the following passing observation turned up somewhere in Wallace’s Infinite Jest:

"Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency."

Admittedly, there's a lot of irony in that last sentence; but perhaps not nearly so much irony as exists between Wood's remark and Wallace's offhand observation.

Only connect, as the maxim had it. Right. But how to do so or retain the ability to do so in contemporary Western society; amid the proliferation of new objects, of new pathologies and addictions, of endless distractions and displacements? Ultimately, that’s what Wallace aimed to address with Infinite Jest. And by his efforts, he managed to create a work that was not only profoundly sad, but was also at turns deeply, viscerally hilarious.

Which is one bothersome thing (among many) about Walter’s comments above. Naive and sweepingly over-simplistic, they beg the questions: Whose science fiction? Whose post-modernism? Whose version of "truth"? Relativism, like irony, often serves as a method of distantiation. Yet both, when properly employed or engaged, provide a potent means of critique against "a world ruled by fictions of every kind." Working through to work beyond. Hasn’t that been the enterprise of the whole literary impulse from the beginning?

Little Disasters

"During the months that followed, Vaughan and I spent many hours driving along the express highways on the northern perimeter of the airport. On the calm summer evenings these fast boulevards became a zone of nightmare collisions. Listening to the police broadcasts on Vaughan's radio, we moved from one accident to the next. Often we stopped under arc-lights that flared over the sites of major collisions, watching while firemen and police engineers worked with acetylene torches and lifting tackle to free unconscious wives trapped beside their dead husbands, or waited as a passing doctor fumbled with a dying man pinned below an inverted truck. Sometimes Vaughan was pulled back by the other spectators, and fought for his camera with the ambulance attendants. Above all, Vaughan waited for head-on collisions with the concrete pillars of the motorway overpasses, the melancholy conjunction formed by a crashed vehicle abandoned on the grass verge and the serene motion sculpture of the concrete."

-- J. G. Ballard, Crash

"I've met a lot of cops recently. They take pictures of everything, only it's almost impossible to get copies of them."

-- Andy Warhol

photos: Arnold Odermatt