between theory and art

I think, on this occasion, we should forget parallax. Or, rather, we should take note of how the notion of a parallax-like relationship between art and theory is already functioning (ideologically, if you want to put it that way) within the contemporary art sign-system. So someone with a Zizekian bent might say: “just as you can see either a vase or two faces, you can see either art or theory, but never both at the same time”. But isn’t this approach already too well inscribed in the attitude of the contemporary art world, which feeds off (in the UK, at least) both an elitist, exclusive domain of theory and an unjustified, obscene access to public funds? Depending on your point of view, a pile of bricks in a gallery can either be a powerful statement of the artist’s desire to be a bricklayer and join the proletariat, or they can be just a nice, strange thing to wonder and look at. - foucault is dead

Foucault is Dead has a brave foray into the relationship between contemporary art and theory. The very thing that keeps many artist's on their toes and I'm guessing causes a lot of self-doubt and anxiety for many more. Worth reading here.

the freeway blogger

Not sure how familiar people are with Tales of the Freewayblogger but this is an ongoing intervention along California highways. This is good stuff and it puts the message where it needs to be - real life, but more importantly in those
in-between spaces. I like it a lot. I wonder if Chelsea were to do the same thing with those Patrick Mimran billboards how the reception would be?

Haggard's massage table on Ebay

This hot piece of evangelical history is now going for $1175.00.
Only 10 years old, looks barely used - if only ;)


tip: evangelicalright.com

world energy flow

couldn't resist swiping this map from Kazys! needless to say but we're not exporting much....and this is 10 years ago.

(click map for full size)

...more Baudrillard

It's been a hectic week and I'm exhausted by it or perhaps I'm feeling sentimental (at Baudrillard's death - if that has any logic). Here's a couple good discussions on the late philosopher.

from Ghost in the Wire:

Baudrillard and Heidegger, 1

Baudrillard and Heidegger, 2



Long Sunday has a pdf of selected writings here.

Jean Baudrillard Dead at 77

Baudrillard has passed into the eternal simulacra. The last generation of influencial philosophy is shrinking in number.

Art for Market Sake II

Art’s willingness, even eagerness to be absorbed by money -- to estheticize money, as it were -- suggests that art, like every other enterprise, from the cultural to the technological (and culture has become an extension and even mode of technological practice in many quarters) is a way of making and worshipping money -- a way of affirming capitalism. Indeed, it is a way of signaling the triumph of capitalism over socialism, that is, the unimpeded pursuit of money and profit at the cost of the common human good that might be achieved by the re-distribution of capitalist-generated wealth.
- Edward Winkleman

Winkleman has a good post to today regarding his frustrations with the current fad - money. Rather the saturation and slavish devotion towards money being exhibited by the players of today's artworld - artists, gallerists, critics.

He sites this commentary by Donald Kuspit on Artnet.com as a source of irritation.

Kuspit:

I will suggest that the irrational exuberance of the contemporary art market is about the breeding of money, not the fertility of art, and that commercially precious works of art have become the organ grinder’s monkeys of money. They exist to increase the generative value and staying power of money -- the power of money to breed money, to fertilize itself -- not the value and staying power of art.

Many years ago Meyer Schapiro argued that there was a radical difference between art’s spiritual value and its commercial value. He warned against the nihilistic effect of collapsing their difference. I will argue that today, in the public mind, and perhaps in the unconscious of many artists, there is no difference. The commercial value of art has usurped its spiritual value, indeed, seems to determine it. Art’s esthetic, cognitive, emotional and moral value -- its value for the dialectical varieties of critical consciousness -- has been subsumed by the value of money.

Let's ignore the fact that this edict is on ArtNet which purports to service the auction sales watchers. Winkleman's complaint is this is lip service and hand wringing with no actions. He may be right and some may argue that a critic is by nature an observer and not a mover. However that ignores the power of many 'name" critics such as Kuspit and his counterparts - "name" artists and gallerists. Kuspit is righ to observe that Art currently is serving capital more and more. We must realize that the current obsession with fairs and markets is an evolution on one hand but also the clammering of an elite wealth class and their managers - the banks - to further establish art as an asset class for their own purposes. An art collector can claim their collection of art as a financial asset whereas an artist can only claim her work as a 'collectible". One party can get financing because of their asset, the other can't.

Contemporary Art is effectively the new dot com bubble. It is unchartered waters for investors and many see it as a get rich quick scheme because it is largely new on the financial radar and almost completely unregulated by tax authorities. It is the wild west particularly in more raw markets such as Asia. It is also a chance to frame the debate for a social class that is largely naive in financial and wealth management matters.

It is important for artists to realize that the tradition they are involved predates capital and will post-date capital. Yes a post capital world is possible based on historic precedents! That we as a group need to look at what Value means and find a real definition of Value so that WE get to frame the discussion. Commerce will always play a roll - we have to eat, and we have bills. But it is the artist (and by extension gallerist, critic, curator) who must define Value for those who want to engage us and participate in this enduring human endeavor.

I'll close with this by Kuspit:

The list implies the conflation of critical value and social value, where social value tends to be reduced to national value, implicitly understood as a bottom line value. To say this another way, price is political warfare carried out by economic weapons. Price signals a partisan national choice, and with that supposedly national art values.

Let me emphasize that while these art money comparisons raise art value comparisons, the market offers no conceptual follow-through or rationale for its prices. Indeed, whatever the national differences, it tends to preclude critical discussion of artistic differences, even as it crudely signals them. Money’s reason for being is enough to make the being of any art rational and give it critical import.

image: Justine Smith via pennyliscious

march madness: curatorial smackdown

LeisureArts has this witty send up on curatorial waters and college hoops. any odds makers out there?

click chart for full scale

old yeller

Well it seems as if many Americans now realize that war is not a tailgate party after all. The Financial Times has this story on the decline of sales of the yellow ribbon car magnet.

The magnets, bearing the slogan “Support Our Troops”, became a symbol of patriotism for millions of US motorists.

But as support for the war fades, demand for yellow ribbons has collapsed.

Magnet America, the largest manufacturer of the product, has seen sales fall from a peak of 1.2m in August 2004 to about 4,000 a month and now has an unsold stockpile of about 1m magnets.

“Every product has a lifespan and this one has run its course.”said Micah Pattisall, director of operations.

hmmm, yes, every product does have a shelf life. Of course the other part of the story is how Chinese imports have had a major impact on sales. Luckily there is a new fad, True Love Waits - the latest in chasitity campaigning.

The American Folklife Center has a fascinating history of the yellow ribbon here. Its origin is a prison song (not Tony Orlando!) and the ribbon is very much a living tradition that can still be steered by a plethora of motivations by disparate groups.

fire walled

Consider the boom in fence building around the globe:

• India and Bangladesh. A 2,500 mile (~$1.2 billion dollars) fence to seal the border from what India fears could become the "new Afghanistan."
• US and Mexico. A 2,000 mile state of the art barrier being constructed in incremental installments.
• Israel and the West Bank. 436 miles of concrete barriers.
• Saudi Arabia and Iraq. A 550 mile wall at a cost of $600 million (part of a ring to encircle the entire country, as with the fence to the south with Yemen).
• Spain and Morocco.
• Thailand and Malaysia. 75 km border fence.
• Pakistan and Afghanistan. A 2,400 km fence.
• Kuwait and Iraq. Upgrade to the 215 km fence with Iraq.
• Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
• UAE and Oman.

Global Guerillas asks this relevant question:

If the Berlin wall (et. al.) were a sign of a fundamental contradiction in the communist system that ultimately destroyed it, are these walls a sign of a similar contradiction (albeit different, given the change in directionality)?


image: Mexican/US border via Subtopia

when we all become photographers

Lens Culture has a post on the surge of photography in every aspect of our lives and the exhibition: We Are All Photographers Now. So what happens when we photograph everything all the time? Where are we all heading? And to echo Lens Culture further, what would Sontag and Barthes have to say? ...that would be fascinating

image:Conflict in Palestine © Keystone

Composting: the drones of memory

Thus, we base all the events in our lives on the continuum of our sorrows; we translate into the emotional language of continuity what would be more accurately expressed in the clear and trenchant narrative of objective events. Continuity is but our emotion, our unease, our melancholy, and the role of emotion is perhaps only to blunt ever-hostile newness (Gaston Bachelard, 2000, p. 60).

What qualified a piece for inclusion on the record was that it took me somewhere, but this might be somewhere that I'd never been before, or somewhere I'd only imagined going to….We feel affinities not only with the past, but also with the futures that didn’t materialize, and with the other variations of the present that we suspect run parallel to the one we have agreed to live in - Brian Eno

Dylan Trigg (author of The Aesthetics of Decay) has an excellent post at his blog Side Effects: Drones of Memory - "Drones" is a wonderful meditation on the interplay of time, memory, and music through the nuiances of nostalgia and artistic endeavor.

Trigg begins his post noting that the strange history of nostalgia has its origin as a medical condition experienced by Swiss soldiers in the 17th century. Native music was considered antithetical to recovery. The ensuing 300 hundred years have been no different in that the relationship between music, time, and memory is a constant aspect of our interior selves and our larger cultural/collective experiences within the frameworks of generation, sub-culture, and geography. It’s obvious that this relationship has actually intensified as the commoditization of the past is at a new zenith in the digital age - as if every I-pod is a time capsule of some sort and method.

Dylan Trigg:

The artificial containment of the past, as evidenced by its commoditisation, leads us to think more precisely about the relationship between memory and music. If music is able to invoke a different place and time, then what does this say about the musicality of memory itself? Two options present themselves. Firstly, we might want to think of music as merely an aid to remembering. In doing so, we would be positioning music in the classical tradition of ars memoria: a memory palace which places objects in a systematic and linear fashion. In discovering a previously stored piece of music, we would, therefore, be (re)discovering the thing (ourselves included) associated with that music….

Yet in contrast to this comparatively reductive view on music and memory, we might also consider another option: that music gives form to memory. By this, I refer to the idea that the temporal structure of music consists of the same formal experience as that of memory. So that, in listening to music, we catch a sight of memory at work. Here too, the view has a distinguished history, not least because Henri Bergson persuasively aligned lived, intuitive time (durée) with musical melody, arguing that our experience of time mirrors the movement of notes “melting into one another” (Bergson, 2001, p. 100). Given Bergson’s conviction that both time and melody are interpenetrative states, the experience of duration becomes seamless. With this seamlessness, it follows that the shape of memory adopts a continuous and unbroken whole. Applied directly to musical melody, is it the case then, that the uninterrupted coherence of a melodic passage forms a structural symmetry with the formation of memory?

Trigg turns his attention to the past with these observations.

When we speak of a landscape of the past, it is accessed by recollection and therefore presupposes the containment of memory. Nostalgia has its own melodic structure whereby it can divide the past into unequivocal units of time. When we return to a time through music, we return to otherness – distant and distinct from the present. But to what extent does the melodic structure come to form an analogy with the nature of time?

Against the divisible tendency of nostalgia to split the past up into unity, so conferring a distinctly narratological aspect upon it, let us consider, if only as a working hypothesis, that such a mode of time is a nothing less than temporal superimposition. Bachelard’s correlation between emotion and continuity is fitting. Insofar as emotion imposes a qualitative dimension on the past, then it has the effect of binding time. With that gesture of binding, a distance is gained between ourselves and the past. At the same time, the suppression of “newness” can be understood in terms of a desire to retain the bordering properties of melody, and to exclude a future which dissents from those borders. Distance and containment, therefore, come to form the image of memory as continuous.

Taking Bachelard at his word, how would we approach the “ever-hostile newness” of time and memory in musical terms?

I want to think about how drones, in particular those we hear in ambient soundscapes, manage to contest a narratological structure, so returning us to an impression of time which correlates with Bachelard’s idea of duration as being a superimposition. If temporal continuity, so far a counterpart to the structure of melody, is said to conceal “the hatched lines of discontinuity,” (Ibid., p. 122) then what does the experiencing of listening to drones tell us about the relation between memory and its form?

Enter the ambient works of Brian Eno as representative of the drone as a counterpower to melody. If melody is understood to establish points of attachment for memory, the drone distinguishes itself as morphological rather than narratological. Trigg observes that a melodic phrase insulates with consolidated gestures demarcating the beginning and the end. The drone lacks these demarcations, creating surges and withdrawals -modulated textures of broken terrains. Here, time and movement are fundamentally suspended and memory blurred. What is left is a porous structure, a timescape where past and future converge simultaneously on the present. It is a gathering of time.

Trigg concludes:

the self-digestion of Eno’s own compositions is an exterior expression of an internal movement within time itself. The reconstituted repetition of Eno’s ambient music is at once an appearance of time as haunting the present, but also of memory as assimilating the past in an uneven and discontinuous manner. Because of this digestion, the distinction between the past and the present becomes ambiguous. As formed from particles of the past, the drone erodes the narratological structure of time precisely through allowing the morphological overlapping of time to develop. The result is that time proceeds to move only through disjoining with memory. Finally then, the peculiarity of the drone is thus that it invites us to consider memory as movement turning on itself. In radical distinction to the ordering of melody, the drone does away with points of (place)-attachment, disclosing in the process a landscape which remains indebted to a past that can no longer be accessed in an original form.


...more on these thoughts soon

* on similiar topic of music built upon its previous forms see this post from Non-Prophet Art

image: Tomato

ideological victory is also ideological defeat

Picture by gusset. Some rights reserved

in a radical revolution, people not only have to 'realize thgeir old (emancipatory, etc.) dreams'; rather, they have to reinvent their very modes of dreaming. - Zizek

We might even say that religious fundamentalism (along the lines of Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell) is the victory of 'postmodernism' and/or cultural studies. These guys take social construction and the importance of packaging, marketing, representation absolutely seriously. They put it to work. To add one more example (and I'm thinking here of Thomas Frank's One Market Under God), we can also say that corporate capitalism is the triumph of a version of 'postmodernism'/cultural studies--think about wink marketing, bricolage, irony, etc.

All these examples suggest the implications of ideological victory--it is also ideological defeat. When one's enemy accepts one's terms, one's very point of critique and resistance is lost, subsumed. The dimension of antagonism vanishes. At this point, other antagonisms emerge, many that are small and non-fundamental, non-crucial. A new kind of confusion occurs as this multiplicity of small antagonisms, each seemingly central, make finding the key division difficult. - Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean has a remarkable post today: Zizek- the true victory. So what happens when your message is accepted as a universal? even by your traditional enemy? That's a hard question and arguably the centerpiece of where we are. The right accepts and practices the by-lines of the pomo-critique yet the left doesn't so readily see this as it still trods along the same lines it did 30 years ago. I think this is largely true in academia and frankly the visual arts. People are still thinking irony is a critique as if they have never watched an advert in their lives. (see Long Sunday's link to an article in the Economist about how POMO has "inspired" retail and shopping strategies)

So what are the repercussions when a hard fought position is accepted by the very people you sought to challenge, even defeat? In the political arena, as Jodi observes, people act as if the right is still concerned with essentialism and origins. The veneer of rhetoric may be there - via O'Reilly - but the strategies, mechanics have long moved on. The center-left needs to understand this if human rights are to be upheld and direct democracy implemented.

For the artworld, this ideological victory/defeat dynamic seems very prescient. I believe (and I think Speaking of Ashes feels the same) that much art today seems to be battling some old notions of meta-narratives and "conservative" art. I've mentioned irony, but we could easily cite a litany of other tried and true methods of revolt - ugly painting, pornography, appropriation, "low" art, etc. etc. Even supposedly political art - as The Differance Engine so aptly nailed in this post - is often times stagnant and self indulgent. In an international market worth billions, these protests largely become niche styles that in fact resemble the establishment more than they confront the establishment and the practitioners are allowed to continue on with their illusions of dissent.

To be fair, I don't have a real answer to confront this or a 'program', but I am glad that Jodi has brought this topic to her blog because it is a critical observation that we can ill afford to not engage.

The Changeling: Donald Rumsfeld

"The past was not predictable when it started." -- Donald Rumsfeld

Perhaps no one loves a man in uniform more than former Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Providing of course that man is a despotic ruler with an itch for massacre and natural resources to sell. No single figure in the history of the United States govt. or military has been as intimate as often with the world's totalitarian fiends. It is not a stretch to suggest that he also is perhaps the most Machiavellian, the most skillful strategist within the halls of Washington over the last 40 years. His instinct for manipulation and self promotion even muted and immasculated Henry Kissinger at his peak. If you want to understand the murky waters of the national unraveling - not only in Iraq - but within the White House as a branch of government, you need look no further than the career of Mr. Rumsfeld. It really plays out like something written by James Elroy, infused with the doublespeak psychosis of 1984's Oceania.

Tom Dispatch has some required reading on the career of Donald Rumsfeld. It's lengthy but worth every word. It is a fascinating look into the horror show of the neo-con movement. Frankly, it is a monstrous tale full of cynical brilliance, shrewd positioning and immoral acts against the national interests and U.S. citizenry.

Donald Rumsfeld: The Undertaker's Tally (part I)

Donald Rumsfeld: The Undertaker's Tally (part II)

(by Roger Morris)


photo: Richard Avedon

28 artists and 2 saints

“The relation between morality and imagination may be a complicated one, but it does exist...Hope, forgiveness — these are not just moral actions. They are enlargements of the mind. Without them, you remain in the tunnel of the self.”

The Times today has a review of a new book - Twenty Eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Acocella. It focuses on the lives of artists (primarily dancers and writers) - rather, the lifetime investment into the creative process itself. That mysterious and often anguished realm that only a practioner can fully understand. For many it is a prolonged exercise in disappointment and loneliness matched with private joys and ephiphanies of all scales. Some of the people covered are Louise Bourgeois, Mikhail Baryshnikov,Hilary Mantel, and Primo Levi. This looks to possibly be required reading in age of hyper-careerism in the arts. It's good to be reminded of the long view.

I particularly like the following observation:

How many artists subscribe to the notion that creative success depends on input from the fickle muse or her modern avatar, mental illness? Probably very few. Like all romantic conceits, it fails to acknowledge the grubby reality of mortal life, in this case the dedicated, often torturous labor a writer or dancer or sculptor invests in what he or she makes. Among the lucid and often delightful observations Joan Acocella makes in her new collection of critical essays, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints,” none is more important than this: “What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite ... ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.”

Arendt and the careerist ethos

The main reason for the contemporary evasion of Arendt’s critique of careerism, however, is that addressing it would force a confrontation with the dominant ethos of our time. In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism. Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think too much and want too much from politics, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state power. He is realistic and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That careerism may be as lethal as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of barbarism, that some of the worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas: these are the implications of Eichmann in Jerusalem that neo-cons and neoliberals alike find too troubling to acknowledge.

A great reading on Hannah Arendt at LRB – Dragon Slayers by Corey Robin


* tip by ICite

another world is possible

So much of the rhetoric about identity effectively ignores: trying to work out what forms of organization, what forms of process and deliberation, would be required to create a world in which people and communities are actually free to determine for themselves what sort of people and communities they wish to be - David Graeber (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology)

the 7th World Social Forum

Many delegates focused on an "issue." Some activists think that access to clean water is most important. Some concentrate on debt relief. HIV/AIDS in Africa is critical to others. Some see tax policy as the cutting edge struggle. The one clearly unifying theme is opposition to the grinding poverty found throughout the global South.

Americans might find that hard to understand. Our awareness of poverty in the global South is low. Likewise, the breadth and depth of opposition to poverty is also little appreciated. Some of that is attributable to the media. As Wahu Kaara, a Kenyan activist who played a key role in bringing the WSF to Africa, put it matter-of-factly "the architectural design of media is to misinform." A fine example of that misinformation is the invisibility of poverty, even domestic poverty in the US, let alone the deeper and wider poverty below the equator. The "shock and awe" that came with Katrina is the exception that proves the rule.

Seeing that many of us in the sphere have been concerned with the "system" - this review of the last WSF may make you feel something hopeful. It is right in line with Graeber's ongoing study into the nature of Value and the need to imagine other worlds at this critical time in history - "liberation in the imaginery".

The Fall: Pulp Modernism 3 (k-punk)

Part 3 from K-Punk has arrived for serious Fall fans - see below. (be sure and watch the video if you haven't)

Part1: Memorex for the Krakens: The Fall's Pulp Modernism

Part2: Memorex for the Krakens: The Fall's Pulp Modernism

Part3: Memorex for the Krakens: The Fall's Pulp Modernism

in and out of line

that any color be anywhere for anything
that anywhere be anything for any color
that anything be any color for anywhere

-jasper johns


image inspired by tomato
text - museum of modern art, 1996

Love and War

Seeing that it's Valentine's Day and superficial tokens of love are swirling, Alternet has a reminder of what love during war looks like for thousands of survivors and those that love them. I'm reminded that the sacrifices of a few are not shared by the whole. The rest of the photos at Nina Berman are worth viewing.



Marine Sgt. Ty Zeigal and his wife Renee Kline
photo Nina Berman www.ninaberman.com.