Archive for February 2005

“The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,” writes Simon Houpt, in today’s Globe and Mail (the article is moneywalled, but it you want to pay, it is here, although I’m gonna try to excerpt the best). He continues:

I don’t mean he couldn’t parse the meanings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,5000 five-metre high doorframes hung with fabric around Central Park, or that he didn’t know whether to call it conceptual art or environmental art or an installation. No, this guy didn’t even know it was art.On the day the curtains were unfurled, the manager on duty at the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South escorted me to the club’s ninth-floor ballroom so I could see the piece from on high. He had no idea why I wanted to go up there: He’d somehow missed all the pre-event press coverage. So as he gazed northward at the thousands of orange shower curtains flapping in the wind, he turned and asked me, “Are they advertising that fabric?”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude call their piece ‘interventions’ because they intrude, or impose themselves and their works, on public spaces. This apparently freaks us out. [emphasis mine] We’re used to one very specific sort of intervention: commercial ones, otherwise known as advertisements. Indeed, many visitors to Central Park have quipped that it’s a shame the artists don’t accept sponsorships, since the nylon orange is a perfect match for the corporate colours of Home Depot. [emp. mine]

I would like to now declare art officially over. That’s the temptation, but of course I shouldn’t. Nothing really ever ends, it just evolves into new forms. One of the things I hate about the discourse surrounding contemporary art and its theories is the feelings of terminality. In the 1980s thinkers went to town declaring the end of this and the end of that. From Danto to Fukuyama, suddenly you and I and everyone else are living in a perpetually post world, as if the Boomers were full of apocalyptic messiahs, for whom all history came into being.

Are we supposed to be reveling in our ‘dreadful freedom’ the keywords of existentialism? Saul reminds us in The Doubter’s Companion that existentialism is an ethical philosophy, which emphasizes that we are responsible, and should be judged on, our actions. ‘We are what we do, not what we intend’, he writes, and it’s obvious that within an existentialist framework, The Gates are an ad. Christo, with his 21M budget, is advertising ‘this isn’t advertising’.

One of the things I found really interesting about the advertising industry, five years ago after No Logo came out and I’d begun to read it, was how I’d just gone through Canada’s premiere conceptual art school, and learned all about the art of ideas, and here were ads which were successfully ‘colonizing’ our mental space. Artists are trying to shake up your perceptions and plant ideas in your head, and yet, if only they had the budget. Conceptual artists are so financially outgunned that they have no voice in this culture, so that even when the occasional big budget artwork gets displayed, it’s not even perceived as art, functioning as an ineffective adbusting. This isn’t unique to New York, or The Gates.

Last summer, when the Power Plant was exhibiting the car-ferris wheel, Sally McKay reported overhearing this conversation:

I went down to the show on the street car and a whole posse of little ballerina girls got on at the bottom of Spadina. As we pulled up to the Harbourfront stop one turned-up-nosed-nymph said to another “Why make a ferris wheel for cars?” Without pause or blink or taint of scorn the second replied “Promotion.”

which was a reply to this post by Jennifer McMackon.

There’s also the Roadsworth case, where the city is trying to bust him for vandalism and for ‘distracting’ drivers, as if the naked ladies on billboards everywhere weren’t distracting already. “The Gates is confusing some people and causing a few to foam at the mouth,” Houpt writes,

Andrea Peyser, one of the many right-wing columnists at the New York Post and a woman who gets angry before she wakes up, declared the piece to be, ‘the artistic of equivalent of a yard that’s been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween’.”

(or, it’s the equivalent of some crackers)

A number of people I spoke with about the piece who described themselves as strong conservatives echoed her comment, saying they didn’t approve of public spaces such as the park being used for an art exhibit.

Houpt goes on to comment that Times Square is the most famous public space in the world that’s devoted to advertising, one that was renamed in 1904 to promote the New York Times moving its headquarters to Long Acre Square a century ago. He notes that the City Council passed a resolution requiring the ads there to be brash and bold. When I went to the Times Square for the first time, I found it as an advertising space absolutely pointless: it was so overwhelming, to this day I can’t remember which ads I saw.

I would though, be able to imagine some future recreation of Times Square circa 2000, which could be an equivalent of visiting today’s baroque cathedrals … just overwhelming image and details absent the context by which we understand it as something to ignore. What I’m suggesting is that in the long run, as a measure of what this culture is about, it is not our artworks that are as interesting as it is our adverts. Which is depressing I admit, but what alternative are artists offering, when they can’t even break out of that paradigm? Perhaps the reason the public is so committed to painting and drawing, (the old, ‘do you paint?’ conversation when you tell someone you’re an artist) or ‘more traditional’ forms, is because advertising has never co-opted it successfully.

When Jonas Mekas gave a lecture a couple of years ago, as part of the Ryerson Kodak Lecture Series, he complained about corporate culture, saying he wanted to celebrate the small, those who embrace failure in everyday life, and those who don’t want to make history. I myself hate the ‘failure discourse’ that’s grown up over the past few years, because it’s pretty retarded (‘I’m gonna be successful by failing’, WTF?) but I was sympathetic to what he was saying. He was bitching about this fashion of mega-art big budget stuff. I can see now that artists are merely trying to compete with ads on their own terms, equally big-budget, equally empty of profundity. It gives me more security to continue making small paintings and drawings, since if I had 21 M dollars, I’d try to do something more socially significant than ‘redecorate a bike path‘.

(a version of this also appears here)

In today’s Globe and Mail, I saw the headline for an article (same report here since The Globe’s archives are moneywalled) which read: “Vatican denounces ‘health-fiend’ madness’, with the sub-heading, “Rejecting society’s costly quest for cures, Rome says Pope’s suffering is to be admired”.

I didn’t read the article, since I felt no need. This has been the Vatican’s position on their increasingly incapacitated leader for years … the Pope wants to promote an acceptance of life as it is, rather than run from all of it’s problems. His illness is likened to the Christ’s willingness to be tortured to save the souls of humanity. It also follows in the Pope’s desire for a ‘culture of life‘ which is one that accepts the disabled and the infirm instead of a political debate on euthanasia, which he’s argued, is nothing more than the healthy desiring to eliminate and hide from things that make them uncomfortable. Those of us familiar with the arguments from the poverty-lobby know what he’s talking about here. Treat human beings as human beings no matter what their circumstance.

Unfortunately, this dismissal on medicine is too much inline with Neitzsche’s analysis of Christianity as a religion of slaves, which is quite literally was in the beginning. The Church becomes an apologist for social injustice, promoting the idea that life isn’t fair and you’d better get used to it, and better yet, find metaphorical meaning in your state of injustice.

It could be argued that the default setting of a human being is that of a religious animal – that spirituality plays a big part of our lives, since the mind naturally looks for meaning in the world, through it’s pattern recognition engine. That’s what psychology has given us, a sensible explanation for our spiritual beliefs. It doesn’t detract from them in anyway, to know how it works, and for me it encourages a healthy attitude toward spirituality as part of a balanced psychology. But we understand there’s a profound difference between spirituality and being religious. Religion has come to be seen by many as a way to keep the ignorant in line – that’s been argued for centuries now. It is a secular position. It seems to follow that if people are prone to religiosity to express their spirituality by default, education almost always eliminates that desire, and makes people in some cases atheists, but in most cases, appreciative of a secular division between religion and state. Pierre Trudeau was an ardent Catholic, but he knew better to be one in public. The USA has not been so fortunate yet, as their presidents turn going to Church into photo ops, to court the votes of their citizens who have gone through their dismal school system. That gimmick alone is probably why they refuse to reform their schools, since then their politicking would get a lot more difficult than simply showing up for photo ops and giving simplistic campaign speeches.

Martin Luther’s Reformation came about because by 16th Century, the Church, which had nurtured education, had become a nest of secular, and in some cases, atheistic individuals (which they wouldn’t have admitted, but it’s fair to say they were cynical). They were making money selling absolutions and enjoying the comforts of a high social standing. They were the CEO’s of their day, disengaged, uncaring, and doing everything they could to maintain their privileged status quo. Even after the Reformation, the Church remained corrupt, so that by the 18th Century, (in France anyway) it was a target of disdain by the Encyclopediaists and Volatire, and in the 20th Century seems to have been a haven for homosexuals well versed in the ideals of Greek Love (not so much pedophiles, but a love for pubescent teenage boys, see this Slate article for more). So, anyway, the point is that the priesthood has often been corrupted by scandal, whether sexual or idealistic. Heretics and perverts, for 2000 years, but still able to nurture culture and thought during the long fall of the Roman Empire.

As a religion of slaves, the Church is an apologist for social injustice. It propagates that injustice even today, with it’s refusal to admit condoms are a good thing. Abortion is something else entirely – as something that celebrates life, as a spiritual exercise, there’s no way it can ever condone abortion. As President Clinton said of abortion, ‘it should be safe, legal and rare’. People who turn abortion into a factor of dehumanization, and go so far as to want to kill abortionists, are clearly more on the Devil’s side than God’s. But religious opposition to abortion encourages us, and reminds us, to treat human beings as human beings no matter what their circumstance. The fact that there’s a difference between a collection of cells and a baby is what allows those of us who support abortion rights to sleep at night.

The prevalence of abortion as a convenience and form of birth control because women aren’t able to face the prospect of being a mother so young, nor being a single mom, especially under conditions of poverty, is a measure of how unjust and how unfavorable our society is toward life. So when the Pope, or even President Bush, talks about nurturing a ‘culture of life’ rather than one of death, I am sympathetic.

Writing from the perspective of the 26th Century, Richard Morgan, in Altered Carbon, describes Catholics this way:

‘Catholics,’ said Ortega, lip curling, ‘Old-time religious sect.’ […] ‘Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best part of two and half-thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more misery than any other organization in history. You know they won’t even let their adherents practice birth control, for Christ’s sake, and they’ve stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries. Practically the only thing you can say in their favor is that this d.h.f thing has stopped them from spreading with the rest of humanity’.

The d.h.f thing is the central premise of the novel, that in the future you can digitize a human’s mind and transfer it from body to body, enabling practical immortality as long as the chip at the base of your skull is not destroyed. In the novel, Catholics have taken the stance that you can’t digitize a soul, and so this is all very immoral and forbidden, even though the rest of society as reformed itself around this reality, which has actually led to a retrogression, since, removing death means it is no longer an effective motivator, nor is it terrifying, so torture – the infliction of memorable pain – is now much more common and necessary, and culture stagnates because memory is so long.

The Vatican can denounce health fiend madness all it wants, and keep propping up their chief invalid, but their philosophical justifications for the most part aren’t helping anybody. It is quite probable that by the 2500s, Richard Morgan’s dialogue will be spoken in actuality by somebody, since Catholicism has too often used it’s philosophers to try and pin down the injustice of the status quo. When I wrote the other day that just because certain problems have been around since Roman times does not so much mean they are timeless as they’re indications that we’re very good procrastinators, it does occur to me now that the procrastination has been helped because the Vatican keeps feeding society’s leaders with excuses not to do anything. And hence, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end’.

Dear Pope,

Timothy

Read this today in Defamer:

Brad Pitt will star in the mind-bendingly self-referential Sony pic Chad Schmidt, where he’ll play an actor that can’t get work because he looks too much like Brad Pitt. You know, kind of like Skeet Ulrich and Johnny Depp. [Variety]

Which reminded me of the project I wanted to do last year, where I wanted to make a video that consisted of a Charlie Rose type interview with an actor, who plays me in a future biopic. Inspired by the appearance of Ed Harris on Charlie Rose when he was promoting Pollock, I basically wanted to do the same thing: interview, with clips from the film. Project didn’t get off the ground for different reasons: no money, no film equipment, too much of mind bender. But as I’ve said about another backburnered project (I have a very big stove with lots of backburners) no reason why I can’t do it in the future.

With Pitt’s movie coming out, and with my idea in mind, I’ve got to thinking about how our time has stopped moving forward, and become nothing more than a pool. Was it Derrida who wrote about this? I don’t know, who can understand him anyway? Time is always compared to a river, which is a very Western conception … time flows in a linear way. Other cultures throughout the world saw time in a cyclical nature, inspired by the regularity of the seasons. Myself, I experience a bit of both … time flows from a distant past, but as Mark Twain said, “Time doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme”, or the other saying I think about, “The more things change the more they stay the same”. Reading history can shock you into a feeling that despite lots of superficial advancements, human beings behave consistently. That’s human nature for you.

Reading the Dune novels in my early 20s though gave a me a sense for deep stretches of time. Those novels cover something like 5000 years, with the emperor Leto II having had a 3000 year reign, due to the spice and other intricacies of the storyline. It made me wonder what our world would be like had an Egyptian pharaoh achieved this type of longevity … imagine having some king who’d be around for 3000 years. In the Dune novels, there’s little cultural variation over these lengthy time periods, because of the status quo of long lived leaders. It helps make me aware that we’re only 2000 years away from the time of Christ, and we think that’s a big deal. But in reality, our species has been on the planet, and creating culture for 195,000 years. We are a very different type of human, but our history divided into centuries is actually pretty insignificant … and hence, we can see that just because social injustice has been around since the time of the Roman Empire, it’s not so much that they’re timeless problems, but that we happen to be very good procrastinators.

Our own time period encourages this procrastination by immersing us in ‘tradition traps’. Jared Diamond, in his book, Collaspe, describes how cultural stubbornness prevented the Norse from eating fish and working with the natives in Greenland, and hence, their colony collapsed. The tradition traps that we are in the midst of are held in place by advertising and all these mixed media messages – a news story on global warming and environmental degradation is followed by an SUV commercial or a TV show glamorizing a lifestyle that is inherently selfish and harmful. As much as we want to be happy in our lives and have a sort or relaxed approach to things, we don’t think that individually we matter too much, and that the sort of things we see happen in the workplace that are wrong, or the choices we make as to where to vacation, matter.

Stuck in a nostalgia loop of marketing, with previous decades being re-presented to us, with ‘greatest hits’ compilations and what not, which should be marketed, or presented, as form of history, are instead presented to us as a rebranded part of our present. In the past – in the 20th Century, the future was something that people envisioned, and planed for. They tried to guide the course of the stream. Today, for a variety of reasons beyond what I’ve already described, the future has been lost. The older generation – our establishment – have failed in the imagination of the future. Even the latest Star Trek show has fallen into re-using plots from the past franchises, and has recently been canceled. Why this generation has failed to lead, to imagine, is only because of the industry of management. John Ralston Saul is my intellectual hero because he really nailed this in the 1990s – how our society had overproduced managers, whose job it is to manage, not imagine. I also can’t help but think that this generation failed because they were blindsided by digitization. In the early 1990s, fax machines and interactive television were seen to be the wave of the future, and bam, along comes the World Wide Web and eBay, Amazon, and Google.

My recent Goodreads selections, documents from the future, show me that imagining the future hasn’t gone away. It’s only been underreported, underrepresented, because people who grew up with computers and watching science-fiction, and thinking about things in ways that reflect our experience of the late 20th Century, aren’t yet part of the establishment. Debates in this country on green-energy and gay marriage, seem pointless to us because we’ve been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. The sci-fi of the 1980s – the last real decade of imagination – inspired us to what our world might be like as 21st Century adults. It was a world of liberal values, inclusiveness, and one that alternated between a violent dystopia and a technological utopia. In 2005 we’ve gotten both.

The dreams for the future that got us this far are now out of gas. We’ve become self-referential. Brad Pitt playing himself is part of what this decade is about, but this was already present fifty years ago, when Richard Sherman’s character in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch referred to ‘the blond in the kitchen’ as maybe being Marilyn Monroe. Seeing that movie the other night was an example of the more things change… since our lives today are still about ‘kids today’ and television, and stress, counting calories, and summer’s being too hot. What has changed is the place of women in society, no longer so domesticated to be sent off to Maine for the holidays. Thank goodness for that. That movie is not as delightful as it once was because it isn’t fair to women. Hence, the more they stay the same, the more things change.

My own project came from a desire for context. To sort-of understand my place in current events – a chance to reproduce some of my favorite scenes in biopics, where a character has a radio on or the news or whatever, contextualizing the story in history. I often felt like my life had become cinematic in that way standing next to newspaper boxes in the month immediately after September 2001. I also wanted to play with the idea that we get it wrong whenever we make these biopics, because as a re-creation of the past, liberties are taken. So I wanted to make something that used the stereotypes of our time to engage in a simulacra, stuff like have the actor playing me wearing Tommy Hilfiger stuff even though I refuse to buy anything that’s Tommy. Trying to represent how this time might be envisioned by the future by using it’s most extreme examples. I mean, a film like Pollock that was set in the 1950s, had a very different use of time-period objects than did The Seven Year Itch which was actually made during that decade.

I was also inspired by the type of delightful mindbender like Adaptation where Charlie Kauffman wrote himself into the story. But I guess a reason I didn’t really pursue it was, A) I didn’t get the grant, and B) I have a hard enough time living as I am without trying to step outside of myself to turn myself into a character … and biopics always centre around ‘the great love story’ and there hasn’t been one for me yet, so such a project is premature. Nor have there been really dramatic things to ‘excerpt’ for Mr. Rose in the 22nd Century.

Romeo Dallaire was being interviewed on Hot Type, and described trying to negotiate with the fuckers who’d organized the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. He said that they had the form of a human being, but they had ceased to be human. It totally reminded me of Ann Coulter. People keep making a joke about how she’s a robot, which I don’t find funny. She’s one seriously evil bitch. One of these days, in one of these columns of her’s, she’s gonna call for something like genocide. Psychologists tell us that dehumanizing your enemy is the first step toward anything approaching genocide.

One of the haunting questions of the 20th Century is how so many ordinary people committed wartime atrocities. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has documented that a common denominator is degradation: a diminution of the victim’s status of cleanliness or both. When someone strips a person of dignity my making jokes about his suffering, giving him a humiliating appearance (a dunce cap, awkward prison garb, a crudely shaved head), or forcing him to live in filthy conditions, ordinary people’s compassion can evaporate and they find it easy to treat him like an animal or object. […]…Accompanied by tactics of dehumanization such as the use of pejorative names, degrading conditions, humiliating dress, and ‘cold jokes; that make light suffering … flip a mental switch and reclassify an individual from ‘person’ to ‘nonperson’ making it as easy for someone to torture or kill him as it is for us to boil a lobster alive.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate p.273/74 & 320/21

Having seen that 5th Estate documentary on the inflammatory Right Wing, my only feeling is in their dehumanization of Lefties, and their own inability to admit that they might be wrong about stuff, they are excersizing evil. And that’s not rhetoric…

But I don’t want to make their mistake by dehumanizing Coulter … at this point, yeah, she’s inhuman, but for all we know she’ll recant in a few years like George Wallace eventually did. Wallace tried to play the race card all the way to the White House, cynically exploiting the bigotry of the South. My impression is the Coulter and Bill O’Reilly have found celebrity through a similar means of cynically exploiting American ignorance and hatred for diversity. Perhaps all of their vile spit is simply a symptom that they’re having a hard time living with themselves.

Sticks and Stones, the 5th Estate the documentary is viewable here in Real Video

The 5th Estate’s Website

Ann Coulter and right-wing stupidity

Comments on the Coulter video on Metafilter

Bill O’Reilly’s pissed with the CBC

(whoopee shit, go fuck yourself O’Reilly, or just “Shut Up!”)

With news that the Pope is in hospital, CBC leads The National with that story, saying that across Churches tonight people were praying for the Pope. Why? He’s the Pope – he’s going to Heaven. After 83 years, witnessing the Nazi and then the Communist occupation of his homeland, and now wracked by disease and age, a ticket to Paradise should be welcome.

Do you think the Pope fears death? A man who’s devoted his life to trying to share his faith with others, his faith that death is nothing to be feared? As Jesus himself said, albeit Jesus a played by Willem Dafoe in the blasphemous The Last Temptation of Christ, “Death isn’t a door that closes, it opens. It opens and you go through it”. Besides, he figures he’ll be back with Christ on the Day of Resurection, which fundamentally is why I can’t consider myself too religious. I believe the dead stay dead: further, I believe the dead end up in museums. It doesn’t make any sense to me to think that one day I’ll be hanging around with a Neanderthal.

Besides, I’ve been saying for years that if Heaven’s going to be full of Christian assholes like Jerry Falwell and the fuckers who re-elected George Bush because he shares their ignorance and lack of appreciation for the world’s diversity, then they can have it. They make Hell sound better and better all the time. I mean, everyone I know’s gonna be in Hell – I’d much prefer to spend eternity with my friends.

Besides, fire and brimstone … why would God punish people like that? Some god that would be. ‘Oh worship me, I’m so insecure! If you don’t I’m gonna burn you’. Sounds more like a spoiled brat than the master of the universe. A spoiled brat that any adult would give a good spanking to if they caught him burning people because they wouldn’t kiss his ass. I mean, that’s pretty much what this whole worship thing’s about: bow down, show deference, respect etc.

I’m all in favor of reverence. I think it’s a required part of a healthy psychology. I’ve heard that the praying 5 times a day thing that Muslims do serves to remind them of their humility – the type of humility that I feel when I lay outside on a summer night and look at the stars.

But worship I find unhealthy. I hate deference. (However, if I’d ever met this Pope, or a future one, you’d bet I’d show deference. It’s part of being an ape, you know, showing respect to the grayback). I don’t want to think of myself as better than anyone, or think someone else is better than me. What I’d like is respect for our differences. An appreciation that we each bring something to the table through our diversity.

If the Pope dies this week, I’ll be happy. I’ll be happy because we’ll have some fresh blood in the tired old church. I’ll be happy because it’ll be a media event that I haven’t yet experienced. Why would I morn? I’ve already said that doesn’t make any sense for anyone familar with Catholiscim (and the fact that Catholics still do morn reveals that deep down we all know it’s bullshit). The Pope’s had a good run – and he’s earned his eternal rest. I can’t say I’ll miss him because I don’t know him, but inasmuch as he was a precence in my life as a Catholic child, I am thankful for his example. He taught me about forgiveness. For those reasons when he came to Toronto in 2002, I wanted to go to his Mass. I did, and I have a memory that I’ll always appreciate.

In my own way I will pray for the Pope – but it will be a prayer of thanks, and a prayer of godspeed.