'Under the Weight of Its Own Success'

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

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

   

*

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.


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

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

Three-Minute Zeroes

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

"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

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.