California Rasins
A Perez Hilton commentator passes judgement on Mackenzie Philips fucking Mick Jagger.
Archive for September 2009
Some Thoughts on Art at the Turn of the Century (1999)
Found in the notebook of ten years ago, dated 21 September 1999. Very much a draft, it was nonetheless written with potential publication in mind. I’ve reproduced some the draft-editing with the cross outs.
I recently watched an NFB film during the Atlantic Film Festival held in Halifax last September. And because it was the NFB, they had a two minute long (five minutes?) montage/ad showing various clips from their archives, to pat themselves on the back with the motto, ‘the images of our lives: NFB/ONF 1939-1999. Sixty years … etc. It reminded me of that the NFB is one of the few cultural products that Canada produces which is more obviously cultural. We are the country that claims to have a culture around shopping merchandise outlets (Eatons, The Bay) and a bunch of grown men chasing a rubber disk around on an artificially frozen slab of ice. (are Canadian examples of Can culture. This is not something to be proud of. It is just pathetic). My point is that what Canada claims to call its culture is really the experience of games and corporations. Anthropologically, there is a case for this, but it’s convoluted. Now the Americans have a culture, there is no denying that. They have important painters and writers and musicians. And they have their Hollywood which claims to produce a cultural product (but in reality seem to produces 2 hour long for commercials they are commercials for the actors and the directors and the toy companies and in the at the turn of the century, the digital effects magicians). Of course, the technically minded will remind us that the century doesn’t start until 2001, which illustrates why the technically minded’s reason and logic have never been too popular, because they ignore psychological realities. You have to reason it out, it’s not obvious, that the century starts in 2001. And the really stupid will say the same about the millennium, but it’s obvious that millennium are periods of a thousand years. I learned that three zeroes males a thousand. We didn’t call 999 two years before the millennium. Nineteen will change to twenty, ninety-nine will change to a thousand. One thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine will become two thousand. Roman numerals will be succinctly MM. And that doesn’t stand for Much Music – mille mille, a thousand thousand. The NFB montage reminded me that film has been the dominant art form of this century. I would rather watch a movie based on a book than read the book, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Purists might think I’m lazy, that I’m some aesthetic chump, but why should I be embarrassed or ashamed to prefer a succint version of literature that I can enjoy visually? Film images are so important to our turn of the century culture the NFB, Canada that they belong to everybody. Sure it says the NFB, it says Canada but it belongs to the world. [This written as a callout]: Canada is an important source of important films that contribute to the world’s culture. [Then this gets personal/reflective]: It occurred to me and then slipped from my grasp. What art was all about. It’s endlessly annoying to hear how art has been categorized, fit into a conceptual framework so that when an educated, supposedly sophisticated art person can give an answer when challenged by the question of certain exhibitions or curious crowd/patrons. To me, the ability to give an answer to the question of what is art is means you in some ways missed the mark. I don’t think art is about questions and answers. I don’t think art is about meanings. I’ve come to appreciate that is which is [sic] dumbfounding, that which is wordless. An experience that is felt and not explained. It is a zen like think for me. So, it is the information age / the space age / the computer age / etc etc. The multitude of names for a period in which we are living, exemplifies one of the stupidities of our post modern age times. “Agh, its too much! Too much …” etc etc. I suppose that type of condition, much cliched now, is the appeal of a dumbfounding art. Perhaps there are many of you that wish to understand, to grasp, who have believed that to know s the goal. But why? A painting is just another picture, a sculpture is just another lump to navigate around. I doubt that there have been such a large number of talentless hacks, that we, as audience members, and the witless appreciative hacks. To make something that is different, to put something which engages the mind and the senses. The importance of artistic things in our lives is numerous – the importance of being dressed, the TV shows we must watch, the song we must dance too. The broad view is the existential one, that we will all die, and so who cares about anything. But death is not a reality for the majority of us. Most of us will not die tomorrow. And while we are young we are infused with the impossibility of death. We can afford to be bored. Art for us can be meaningless. Our young women can afford to listen to Celine Dion and Mariah Carey. Art appears to be the biggest side show of all. Here in colonial North America, haunted by a past that as Canadians we are ignorant of, and haunted by the American history and the American culture, culture is a terrible thing, something to avoid by going shopping at Eaton’s, or by watching a hockey game.Psychological Realities If art has value it is in teaching the dominance of psychological reality over the land of logic and reason. I certainly am not advocating stupidity, but to be conscious and balanced historically what has been called “a well rounded person”. We must balance the basic stupidity of reason with the knowledge of experience. Art is one of the best, if not the best and the if not the only appropriate medium/vehicle for the communication of experience. I like my art to be fantastic and fanciful. Full of make believe. Fairy tales. I don’t like my art to be political and the pretentious. I don’t like people who judge and make enemies based on style.
[The following is dated 22 September. Here I anticipate some of what I’ve encountered studying Christopher Alexander’s ideas about ‘centres’ and ‘wholeness’] ? Art is a manifestation of being. Art objects exist, but they are object or concepts that are dependent on other objects and concepts. They are structured from pre-existing structures. Art are a posteriori objects/concepts. ? Art objects contain souls. That is, there is within them an element that excites the subtleties sense of the subtle. Art objects, because they are fabricated from pre-existing structures, like life forms, carry within them elements of the auras of meaning from their ancestors. A collage is just not a coll glue and fragments, it’s a little bit of this magazine and this it’s sources. [More personal/reflective] What is the need to vocalize, to write this down? If I want an art that is free from conceptual frameworks and labels, why do I find myself penning an essay on art? Won’t the readers use this to formulate new soundbites on art? An attempt to understand using the tools of understanding: that is an effect on language. The constructed object is a creature of being more eloquent and noble than a drop of sweat of a pile of excrement. The sufferings today caused by a lack of dignity. To create if to dignify o
bjects and surfaces. Human dreams in concrete form
Wonders of the imagination
Achievements of the imagination
The Image nation
Eddie Bauer, 2151 AD
2001 – "That's the whole idea, you know. 150 years from today is not very far. [Yesterday on the set,] we were talking about what companies are going to be around. We were on location, and LeVar Burton's directing this week. He had on this Eddie Bauer get-up from head to toe, and we were talking, 'You know what? Eddie Bauer will be around in 150 years.' You can get your mind around 150 years from today. And there's some things you can say: 'Oh, no! Definitely will not be here in 150 years.'" – Scott Bakula, August 2001
2009 – "On June 17 2009, Eddie Bauer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection."Carl Jung’s Red Book
The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
By SARA CORBETT
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
Mad Men with Blackberries
Mad Men debuted in 2007, and corresponds to a fin-de-decade zeitgeist which may in turn provoke the next decade (2010-2020) to look more Modernist. Will Mad Men inspire people to begin dressing in similar ways? Already in the summer of 2009, Banana Republic had partnered with the show to sell similar fashion.
(source)
Correspondingly, when the Drake Hotel opened in Toronto in 2003, they adopted a Modernist design format (to reflect the owner’s idea that the Hotel should be a bohemian place that would inspire present day Beatniks), but by 2008, the Hotel was being depicted as if it existed on a lonely New York St during the 1950s and 60s.
(image by Justin Adam)Battlestar Galactica ran from 2003-2009, and depicted an essentially contemporary society (albeit one without spaceships and jump-drives). A spin-off series, Caprica, has been developed (it’s pilot premiered on DVD in 2009, the series itself in 2010), but set fifty years prior to the ‘contemporary’ Galactica series, uses costume design and other aspects to depict a retro-society; thus in effect matching the actual zeitgeist of the 2010s: a neomodernist highly technological society: Mad Men with Blackberries.
(from the Caprica DVD pilot]
(A interesting note: one of the first reviews of the Caprica DVD pilot stated, “I love the possibilities of retro/futuristic style and wish it had been more consistently applied across costumes and set dec. What they achieved is pretty generic, mid-twenty first century Canadian.” )
Generic mid-21st Century Canadian
Subsequently, in twenty years, when both Caprica and Mad Men are downloadable retro shows from the 2010s, will people understand the contrivance of Caprica‘s Modernism, or see it only as reflection of the times in which it was created? In other words, by 2019, will our fashion and everything-design make it seem like we’re living in Caprican society? Does the popularity of Mad Men reflect a yearning for an elegance and style lost during the Postmodern period? Will we see a return to that, and in so doing become Mad Men with Blackberries & iPhones?
Day Arcs Illustrated
In need of a demain name.
I started this Posterous account over the summer, in abandonment of both my Goodreads project and the blog on my website. I was trying something new. I also understand that Posterous has the ability to multi-post, so eventually I’ll set it up to sync with my /blog. However, over the summer I was working on a new site design, and while that’s pending I’m in no rush to set up that functionality yet.
As for Goodreads, that project is pretty much over. I plan on leaving it alone, and maintaining its archive. I just need to do some digital reorganizing. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to think of a new domain name, because I want to move on from GR into something else. I anticipate moving a lot of the GR content to this new thing, whenever that comes together.
Simon Schama’s Renactment
Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodernism’
“The historical role of modernism, in the sense of a phenomenon arising with the domain of art, resides in its ability to jolt us out of tradition […] Art today needs to reinvent itself, and on a planetary scale. And this new modernism, for the first time, will have resulted from global dialogue. Postmodernism, thanks to the post-colonial criticism of Western pretensions to determine the world’s direction and the speed of its development, has allowed the historical counters to be reset to zero; today temporalities intersect and weave a complex network stripped of a centre. Numerous contemporary artistic practices indicate, however, that we are on the verge of leap, out of the postmodern period and the (essentialist) multicultural model from which it is indivisible, a leap that would give rise to a synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism. Let us call this synthesis altermodernism'”.-Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodernism catalogue essay.
Andy Warhol
Looking at the Andy Warhol ‘Giant’ book last night at Dan’s (Phaidon press, Dan’s friend’s book) impressed by the layout, comprehensiveness. The images, ticket stubs, newspapers, and really great photographs. Especially liked the picture of Warhol shopping (buying Campbell’s soup etc). I’ve never bought into the hype of Warhol, but I don’t doubt his relevance. Part of the problem of his legacy is how much popular culture adopted the forms he made permissible. It’s hard to look at the 1980s portraits made from Polaroids and rendered as silkscreens and not think of a cheap Photoshop filter. There are some who judge the quality of an artist by the level of subsequent adoption – Jackson Pollock, for example, made a drip-painted look for a table top something decorators could take seriously. Similarly, Apple encodes the ‘Ken Burns’ effect into it’s image software.
What was also apparent in the Warhol books is how much it was a documented party-scene. New York’s hipsters, looking like the hipsters of today (who are emulating their model) are preserved in their beautiful baby-fat youth for the rest of time. Thirty years later now their hair is grey, their bodies thick, their stamina not what it was then, and such is the way of things. But in New York moment in historical time, they were partying under the paternal patronage of Uncle Andy who took their photos and made pictures of them.
I was also struck by the absence of politics. There was the Warhol silkscreen of Nixon, ‘vote McGovern’ and it’s comprehensible if you know something of American politics of the early 1970s. But we are now living in the 21st Century, and it is a cultural artefact – highlighting the transience of American Presidencies. Nixon from here on and for the rest of time will merely be a collection of images (videos & photos) recorded audio tracks (the Tapes) and documents. In a hundred years, internet-conspiracy theorists will probably claim that he was a fictional character developed in 2002, just as they claim that 9/11 was an inside job and that the Moon landings never happened.
Of history, we should always remember the thousand years of memory outweighs the minutes of its creation; that is to say, murdering Julius Caesar probably took all of five minutes, but it has been remembered for over two thousand years. Such things exist in a much grander context than their initial inception. And they become the possession of a greater population of people than those who lived through them. (A greater number of people have been alive in the past two thousand years than the population of Rome in 44BC who lived through the actual event).
How we access and understand the context comes through the artefacts. Shakespeare’s imagining of Caesar’s death is renewed it’s memory in our civilization. The Frost/Nixon film last year renewed the memory of Nixon’s presidency. And today of course is a day of the renewal of memories of the terrorist attacks of eight years ago.
We may understand the history of Nixon, and of supermarkets, and of canned food. But how a particular human being reacted to them is what is documented in the art: Warhol got his peers to ask questions about and consider the packaging of popular culture. His works was also there as a reference during the development of machines that could render an image in millions of pixels and have each and every pixel subject to manipulation.
I was also looking at the book a day after Obama’s presentation to Congress on the importance of American Health Care Reform. Undoubtedly, Americans will eventually correct the imbalances of their health care system. Twenty years from now, no one will care. But on the coffee table of somebody’s home will be a book of some artist’s work that we presently have either never heard of, or just had a beer with at an opening. It is culture than always transcends the pettiness of politics. Politicians like to think their laws and policies are contracts and set in stone, and are some form of realized Platonic entity. They’re nothing of the sort. They can be repealed and amended. Politics is a game of making our lives easier to live. But once we have an easy life, the needs of our imagination become paramount, which is why cultural history wins.
Of the book, this seems the ultimate legacy. We may see Warhol paintings in any museum in any city on Earth. But very few of us will actually be able to go through the Warhol archives and see the collection of stuff accumulated in his lifetime. The book then functions as a curated display of celebrity relics, and allows us to conceptualize the totality of the oeuvre. The message, “This is the accomplishment of one man’s life in historical time”.
That Warhol and the New York rockstars photographed by him led cultural lives is a given. And it created a model for a society which would put a phone in everybody’s pocket, and a camera in each phone. Party blogs are responding to the idea that documentation is what one does, incase anyone becomes famous later. But not only do you trap someone’s pre-fame, you also believe that this is how one lives a cultural life – by dressing like they did thirty years ago, photographing everything, and ultimately perhaps publishing your youth in a book when your body is thick and your hair is gray. Good times, good times.
A tall house please
“Paying for things is our way of compensating all the people who have been inconvenienced by our consumption. (Next time you buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, imagine yourself saying to the barista, ‘I’m sorry that you had to serve me coffee when you could have been doing other things. And please communicate my apologies to the others as well: the owner, the landlord, the shipping company, the Columbian peasants. Here’s $1.75 for all the trouble. Please divide it among yourselves.’)” – Joseph Heath, Filthy Lucre (2009) p. 160