Since I was a child I’ve been fond of Jesus’ parable of feeding the spirit: that man cannot live by bread alone, but also requires the word of God. I think the reasons I’ve always appreciated this were because it was well explained to me by a teacher who had formerly been a priest, and it made sense to me in a manner that has remained true to my life as I’ve lived subsequently. That the spirit, or mind requires feeding seems self-evident.
This idea has been relevant to my interest in the arts, and I’ve also noticed over the years a personal preference for food metaphors. Food, after all, is a substance we ingest, we bring into ourselves, where it is transformed into something disgusting that comes out the other end of our bodies. This transformation is called digestion, and we understand through this process we remain alive through the derivation of nutrients, in effect becoming “what we eat”.
This physical digestion can mirror of that of the mind – we continually ingest, take into ourselves, ideas that enter our mind through conversation, reading, and general interaction. Our minds continually process the languages of our environment, be they symbolic, gestural, or spoken, and ‘digest’ them into some part of our worldview and subsequently some part of our sense of self.
Almost everyone alive is capable of feeding themselves in some way, even if they are not actually able to cook a meal. In that sense, we are all literate to the symbology of the gastronomic spectrum, all the way from food freshly killed in a hunt to the four-course meal of a fine restaurant. Along the spectrum are canned food we merely reheat, sandwiches, and fast food burgers. So-called special occasions require meals at the higher end of the spectrum, whereas quotidian meals after a long day can occur on the lower end.
Carr: Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that is absurdly overrated by everyone else.
Tzara: Because man cannot live by bread alone.
Carr: Yes, he can. It’s art he can’t live on.
-Tom Stoppard, Travesties (1975)
If the spectrum of food goes from the self-acquired meal to restaurants, on what spectrum does art lie? Why in effect, is my question being asked? Because Art is a strange and forever undefinable thing, precisely because it is a food of the mind, an intangible and a philosophically confused concept. As Wittgenstein sought to make clear a hundred years ago, some philosophical problems are merely problems of semantics, entanglements of concepts without a clear language. Art is such a thing: forever subject to pithy definitions which merely become mottoes for one of its clique camps. For the conceptualists art is something different than for the painters, and thus like God it is subject to much under its name, in a variety of churches under many flags.
Why is it we consider it normal for children to draw? And why do we find it usual that adults mostly do not draw? For that matter, why do we find it normal for children to play, and find it usual that most adults do not play, but those who do are honoured as actors? In keeping with my food theme, children do not eventually grow out of making food for themselves. Sure, there are people who ‘can’t cook’ but presumably this means they are reliant on heating up frozen dinners. Food making remains a part of our lives throughout, while art making is allowed to disappear.
But does it? If you can’t cook, that can be done for you – simply go to a restaurant or a soup kitchen. But art? One goes to a gallery, and hence a gallery is analogous to a restaurant. Or, like the ever-present unquestioned nature of food culture, we could say the dominance of created visual products we call tv shows and/or movies (even video games) are somehow reflective for our appetite for imagined products.
Galleries do not seem to think of themselves as restaurants for the spirit, offering menus of imagined products. However, if pressed, I think they would see the similarity between the haute cuisine chef and the international exhibiting artist.
Human beings took our animal need for palatable food … and turned it into chocolate souffles with salted caramel cream. We took our ability to co-operate as a social species … and turned it into craft circles and bowling leagues and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We took our capacity to make and use tools … and turned it into the Apollo moon landing. We took our uniquely precise ability to communicate through language … and turned it into King Lear.
None of these things are necessary for survival and reproduction. That is exactly what makes them so splendid. When we take our basic evolutionary wiring and transform it into something far beyond any prosaic matters of survival and reproduction … that’s when humanity is at its best. That’s when we show ourselves to be capable of creating meaning and joy, for ourselves and for one another. That’s when we’re most uniquely human.” – Greta Christina, Sex and the Off-Label Use of Our Bodies| (My source)
Creating anything is a human thing to do: we take basic foods and we make meals, and we take sticks and make symbols. Everyday we manipulate a set number of symbols in composing text messages and emails, and to do so is to be part of our human community. A teenager unable to text (i.e. write) in today’s world would be one who is cut off from their community, and thus damaged. Being human is to be both a meal maker and an art maker, but importantly, I am using the word “art” in a generic creative sense of the word to encompass everything learned and extensive of the imagination, such as writing quotidian messages, or the dominating created world of pop culture.
Along the food-spectrum analogy, most everyone is capable of making a sandwich. Culturally, the creativity of everyday is not very advanced. Once we get beyond sandwich making, the understanding of these cultural worlds diverges: the fine restaurant has a place in our lives that a fine gallery doesn’t.
“Food” as a word is easily understood as something encompassing a long spectrum of things that are ultimately put in the mouth. But Art, through its semantic confusion, is not easily reduced as something “put somewhere”. It does not have an obvious end point, but is to be described as “experienced” or “felt” or “seen”.
What interests me is why the analogy of restaurants so easily breaks down, and why Art remains perceived as something privileged and removed, whereas restaurants and food culture are so thoroughly embedded. Why do galleries exist dependent on grants, whereas the idea of supporting a restaurant by grants is absurd? The easy answer is the physical need for food makes food culture obvious, but we do not speak of art as psychological need which would make its cultural contribution obvious as well. Also, the another obvious answer is that pop culture provides the feeding of the psychological/imaginative appetite so thoroughly that only those with “finer palates” seek out the higher forms in prestigious galleries. This is analogous to the “culture war” within Food: buying organic and local vs. fast & processed.
In the Art culture, we have fast and highly processed food as well. And just as a diet consisting entirely of highly processed food is extremely unhealthy, it is probably equally mentally unhealthy to be a digester of corporatized pop culture exclusively. Unfortunately, like a Big Mac filming a Whopper, reality television has begun to exploit the end products of generations of television: these terrible, stupid people who are not (in the old sense of the term) “cultured” precisely because they are instead “pop cultured” and thus comfortable with confessing to video diaries and being idiots on camera.
“I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it. – David Brooks, Social Animal
To be alive is to participate in a food stream, and to be human is to participate in a knowledge stream. A human beings, we participate in a collectively created culture which subdivides into subcultures, two of which are food-related and art-related. Food culture is so healthy in its level of participation that people need to be careful around it, lest they become obese, while art culture is a muddied, confused and sclerotic thing, always being defended and dependent on social largess.
Clearly, the place of Art in our lives requires a rehabilitation—one which recognizes its place in a healthy and full life. Just as a diet consisting entirely of fast food is dangerous, so too is a mental life informed solely by corporatized products. However, this is not to be read as a defence of government grants, but simply to remind you that restaurants do not require support. If we include film, we may already have a healthy art-culture. If we consider art to be something solely related to galleries, we may ask why haute cuisine is not dependent on grants, or why the art experience away from commercialization insists on being free, when it is free food that one really requires.
Everything makes sense up until the 1960s. Essentially, artists were craftspeople throughout history. Michelangelo really was only a housepainter, employed to illustrate The Bible. Money made the work more ornate, but the Old Masters were craftsman employed to create images such as portraits and decorated ceilings.
In the 19th Century, industrialization invented oil paint in tubes. Suddenly artists could take trains out to the countryside to paint landscapes on the weekend. (Why they wanted to paint landscapes has to do with the-then-new Romantic sensibilities). Painting outdoors, they became more interested in capturing their impressions of what they saw, rather than spend a lot of time on finishing the work according to the standards of the day.
Claude Monet, Tulip Fields in Holland, 1886
While these artists were doing this, the ‘academic’ artists had moved on from illustrating the Bible and had begun illustrating the Classical mythology of Greece and Rome.
John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891
Because what the academics were doing was boring, the Impressionists gained popularity, due to their example of allowing an artist do to whatever they wanted. So by the time Picasso begins working, he’s all like fuck it, I’ll just draw some crazy shapes and give them eyes and call it a portrait.
Pablo Picasso Tete d’homme, 1912
Picasso distorts art history here, as the galleries get hip to what he’s doing, and realize they can sell his stuff for all sorts of reasons, including the radio-land sense of a new civilisation based on cheap energy, and so Picasso has a chateau-based life of daily doodling which sells for millions. The distortion he creates in the art market means that artists all over the Western world think to themselves, ‘if he can do it, I can do it’. Craftsman working in the 15th-19th Century traditions (late 19th Century academics and contemporary place like the Academy of Realist Art) get marginalized in favour of the gang after Picasso’s easy money and easy lifestyle.
Basically, by the 1920s, artists have full licence to do whatever they want. Picasso can call geometry a portrait, and in New York Duchamp can call a urinal a fountain. By the 1950s, artists are all like, fuck portraiture, use a camera for that, let’s just put colours together. Imagery is boring.
Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow 1956
Artists are now doing whatever crazy shit they want to do. A bed with paint splashed on it? Fuck it, why not.
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed 1955
By the time we reach the 1960s, there has been a full breakdown of the tradition of craftsmanship.
Also, by this point, the technologies of video & film have begun to appear, so by the 1970s, a first generation of tv babies have arrived and want to make their own tv shows, producing a lot of black & white and unwatchable television. Technology is cheap, and artists are no longer just craftspeople asked to make a statue for a garden or decorate a ceiling, they’re now in the business of ideas. Books, words on walls, videos of Buddhas staring at themselves: an explosion of cleverness and wit. The Picassoesque art market is able to absorb, promote, and sell all this stuff, to both rich people but also to Institutions.
Nam June Paik, TV Buddha 1974
We’ve now had half a century (1960-2010) of crazy-shit art. The aesthetic experience written about by 18th Century philosophers has been replaced by the WTF? impulse. Artists today are not seeking to generate emotions of the sublime or of disinterest, but rather evoking a sense of bewilderment in the viewer is seen as an achievement.
The decline of craftsmanship has been compensated for by the ego of the artist: like Duchamp, Picasso, the unwatchable video artists, the message is, yes, anyone can do this shit, but I did it. In that not all artists are insufferable egotists, a subtext to this strategy is the belief that the variety of human experience should mean that their ideas, presented through gallery or however, may be valuable to someone. The artist offers their work both as a self-promotional vehicle, but also as something that another may find useful. (Quite often, it is most commonly used as a conversation topic).
I could also refer here to Richard Rorty’s definition of genus as the useful obsession by others. Private obsessions we just call crazy, but when an individual’s ‘craziness’ opens new avenues for others, we consider that person brilliant (as in ‘they light the way for others’). The postmodern condition of this half century has been one in which people are free to make up their own truths. While it is a sign of mental health to be aware that not everyone thinks the same, when exploited it can be dangerous (ie truthiness). The crazy-shit art of the contemporary is reflecting the many truths competing for attention, and the multitude and anarchy of art-products and art-production today offers a variety of individual obsessions seeking to be useful by others.
02. Another brief history of art
The Roman portrait bust is representative of the craftsmanship of the era, used for public-relations purposes and to document the individuals of a time and place.
By the end of the Empire, the busts had declined in quality and become stylized.
A ‘barbaric’ millennium follows until the ‘regeneration’ (renaissance is a French word meaning ‘rebirth’) of both ancient art and learning begins to restore both the quality and craftsmanship, so that by the 19th Century, the academics were illustrating both the myths of Rome and Greece, and the daily street scenes of fifteen-hundred years prior.
Sir Lawrence Tadema, Sculptors in Ancient Rome 1877
The United States of America was founded in the late 18th Century as a restored Roman republic.
Horatio Greenough, George Washington as Zeus 1840
By the late 20th Century, The United States represented the completion of the project to restore Rome, and had become an Imperial power. However…
…its art had become stylized, and craftsmanship was in decline. The civilisation was exhausted. Artists were exhibiting glittered cum stains on newspapers.
Apple’s secrecy produced another big open secret: they were developing a tablet, and they made it official yesterday. Steve Jobs acknowledged the hype (which one presumes wasn’t supposed to exist at all) when he showed The Wall St Journal quote. However, the resulting massive buildup of hype produced an anticlimactic ‘meh, tell us something we didn’t already know’.
The device will only be available in two months, which in turn means this press conference was little more than a means of stemming the flow of leaks – yes, we’re working on a device, but no, it’s not ready yet, and yes, we’re building on what we’ve already done with the iPhone, but no, it doesn’t use facial recogniation software to control different accounts for family members, nor does it have a tactile interface.
In a sense (and this is written in fairness to the meh) what Steve Jobs did yesterday was travel back in time and present Shakespeare with a Bic rollerball: a rather useful technological achievement, but something that in the future we won’t be too wowed over. We aren’t that wowed over it now, and that is my point.
Because we’ve been exposed to tablets in film and television for over twenty years, part of the excitement prior to the announcement came from the fact that these things were finally real. In fact, the devices in the Star Trek shows between 1987-2005 were called ‘padds’ (an acronym) and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn the iPad was named in recognition of this. In Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels series (set between the 2040s and the 2170s) they were called ‘slates’ and ‘pads’ alternatively. They are high tech devices, but they are like 20th Century rollerball pens. They are meant to facilitate our use of our networked high technology, and be so ubiquitous in the future that they are taken for granted.
So when Steve Jobs says this is the best thing he’s ever done, and when Jonathan Ive is on video saying ‘it’s magical’, this is where they’re coming from. The iPad would have lived up to its hype and then some were this the year 2000, but no. The iPhone announcement was a big deal in 2007 because nothing operated like it at the time, and it hinted at where the technology was going. Three years later, they’ve managed to produce extra large versions with a ten hour battery life.
Other companies will also be producing electronic tablets, but one imagines that Apple’s will be superior in ease of use and aesthetics – and these reasons are why the hype was so great. Apple makes beautiful objects. (What most people skipped was that they are now making their own chips, which is a big deal).
Jobs ended his presentation by telling us that the company seeks to exist at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts.
This was a great reminder of the importance of the liberal arts, and the statement came with embedded snarkiness. Businesses like Microsoft, in the words of Jobs, ‘have no taste’. Most businesses, for that matter, put little stock in the value of the arts. Further, most politicians put little value in the arts, and those students who wish to study the liberal arts at a post-secondary level are told they are jeopardizing their future. We have a very arts-unfriendly society, and a resulting population of imaginatively im
poverished citizens. Citizens, in turn, whose imaginations are so blighted that they seem mystified by Apple’s success. They’re all like, ‘Apple, wow, how do they keep coming up with hit products?’ In producing attractive things, Apple has both ignored the academic post-modern attacks on the idea of beauty, and wowed the business world by becoming a fifty-billion dollar company.
While Jobs was introducing the iPad, Margaret Atwood was at the annual Davos conference to accept another award, and planed to deliver a speech, which was cut for time. As introduced by Jane Taber at The Globe and Mail: “Margaret Atwood was poised to tell the world’s business and political elite today that politicians have ‘done their best to finish’ off art.”
I am thankful that Apple’s example exists to counter the tasteless lack of imagination of our ruling elites.
From here, Apple now has to bring us electronic data sheets, as represented in the new series Caprica. The iPad is a twenty-five year old idea for which the technology has finally been developed. The Caprica data sheets appear to be where we go from here.
Today’s Huffington Post links to a Nypost article on “the creepy painting” of Michael Jackson in Michelangelo’s David pose, surrounded by cherubs. We are told that it was commissioned in 1999 from the artist David Nordahl.
This painting was glimpsed in the 2003 documentary by Martin Bashir, and from which I took the screencaps to compose the piece (below) I had in Zsa Zsa Gallery’sThe Michael Jackson Show show in Toronto, and which closed on Michael Jackson’s 45th birthday.
As I stated in that peice, he had delusions of godlihood. I do not know if the Nordahl work has a title, but I’d imagine it acquiring the name ‘The Apotheosis of Michael Jackson’, and considering the default longevity of oil and canvas, it may become a type of Mona Lisa image of the 26th Century – something most people are familar with, but it will be few who will have actually looked up the surviving electronic documents to see the videos.
CNBC has a slide show of work from his collection. This dates from last March, when Jackson was planning an auction to gain some cash for his troubled finances. As I’ve known about the apotheosis painting for almost seven years (Bashir’s documentary aired in January of that year) it doesn’t surprise me that Jackson’s taste was so bad. What I was surprised by were the other paintings wherein he’s a king, or a knight. I find this one (also by David Nordahl) most alarming:
And this robotic head reminds me of the end of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
I found the slide show through a search for “David Nordahl”. The thumbnail for the following made me think he was a Mormon artist responsible for the type of images of white-Jesus amidst tanned-white-people Indians as seen in their texts. On clicking I see that instead it’s a very Socialist Realism depiction of Jackson that wouldn’t stand out from a collection of Maoist images from the Cultural Revolution. I would like to think that Nordahl is savy enough to have put Jackson in a red shirt for this reason – consider this painting “The Nordahl Code”. Herein lies coded images depicting truths about his interaction with this disturbed man, but I’ll leave that to the thriller novelists of the future.
Frank Herbert, in his last novel Chapterhouse Dune, wrote of a Van Gogh painting which had survived the millenia and was a reminder to that cohort of humanity of an element of wildness in the human imagination. It is an eloquent passage about the importance and lasting effects of artwork. Jackson in turn stands as a testament to the WTF? element in the human, but this message speaks most clearly to us, the present living who shared the world with the living figure, but a century from now, these paintings, stripped of the context that we take for granted, will be a mess of mixed messages. By this I mean that we know that Jackson’s thing for being depicted as a king comes from his marketing as ‘the king of pop’. And that the associated art is tasteless and ignorant.
Jackson as a knight, or as a king … a schoolgirl of 2110 will have no reason to think that the man depicted there was not those things. Also, these works are a reminder that while painting we call ‘contemporary’ has become a blotchy mess of shapes, colour and tube turds, there remains this underground of figurative realism that ‘tasteless’ celebrities hire for their own personal propaganda. The tradition of Queen Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, Napoleon (ancient figures from a pre-photographic world shaping their image for the present and future generations) continues for the celebrity-royalty of today. The truly wealthy and powerful (billionaires) just support the museums and keep the industrial scale works they purchase in secret storage somewhere.
What is fortunate is that Jackson’s megalomania was somewhat harmlessly channeled into a career as a song & dance man. In the history of celebrity, Jackson is perhaps unique in the use of the cult of personality, and someone attached to his organization must have studied its long history, from Rome through to Stalinist Russia. Had he been a political figure, it seems certain he would have been the worst kind of monster, a Caligula with a harem of boys. Consider how this video depicts (part of the 1997 History campaign) some kind of Roman Emperor Soviet Russia fantasy:
Michael Jackson was not a healthy man in any sense of the word. Those of us who take art seriously can see in it just how ill he was, and we can also recognize the depth of ignorance amidst his fans. That people have gotten tatoos ‘in memoriam’, that people leave glowing comments on his YouTube archive, is just another example and evidence of a failed education system. The art will echo down the centuries as a reminder that in the late 20th Century, Western soceity was totally fucked up.
Michael Ignatieff listening to Isaiah Berlin tell a story about Ludwig Wittgenstein, from his 1995 interview broadcast on BBC in 1998. (YouTube)
Taking the Go Train home on Saturday 26 February 2005 (I had been at that afternoon’s panel discussion put on by the Canadian Art Foundation which I reviewed for BlogTo) I picked up that day’s National Post lying on the seat in front of me. I came across Peter C. Newman’s article on Michael Ignatieff regarding his keynote speech at the upcoming Liberal convention. The article suggested that Ignatieff’s long-term goal was to become the party’s leader and by extension a potential Prime Minister.
The following Thursday (3 March 2005) I saw Darren O’Donnell’s A Suicide-Site Guide to the City , and afterward went to a C Magazine launch on College St. That afternoon, four RCMP had been killed in Mayerthorpe Alberta. The day was already full of Canadian content, and so perhaps I was already primed to appreciate Ignatieff’s speech & vision for the country. I had a midnight snack with CPAC on and the speech mid-way through, I later shifted to the couch to finish watching it. Before retiring I put a tape in the VCR to let it run overnight, to catch the repeat.
With that in hand, I ripped the audio and made the transcription that I posted on Goodreads. Ignatieff had first come prominently to my attention in 2000 when he delivered that year’s Massey Lectures (I remember listening to one as I drove in the November rain) but even at that time I was already vaguely aware of him, having read the Globe & Mail review of his 1998 biography on Isaiah Berlin. Through the speech and the background I thought Prime Minister Ignatieff would be a good thing.
As I’ve written previously, part of this was the idea that ‘Canada deserves to have a Massey Lecturer as Prime Minister’. But that’s just my bias for intellectual public figures asserting itself. Privately, I share the reservations of many: that he’s an expat who left only to return when it suited his ambition. That he advocated for the Iraq war (writing in The New York Times using the ‘we’ implying he was an American citizen) and that he’s been an Imperial apologist through his ‘lesser evil‘ arguments. However, it would still be nice to have a Prime Minister who thinks out loud, rather than those who do not seem to think at all, yes?
So, at some point in early 2006, I went on the Ignatieff website and sent them a note, offering to volunteer toward his campaign. I got no response whatsoever, not even a email list auto-responder message. However, on 5 September 2006, while I was browsing in Ten Editions bookstore on Spadina, my cell phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize. My hesitant hello was matched with a female voice asking me to be a delegate for Ignatieff in Montreal’s November convention. I was like, uh, ok. What does that mean?
I was told that it wouldn’t cost me a dime, and at that point they merely wanted to put my name on the ballot in my riding. The Liberals would be voting for delegates, and elected delegates would then go on to Montreal. There was some paperwork. I was like, ok, cool, whatever.
My walk to the train station that evening was filled with thoughts of destiny by way of the weirdness of out of the blue phone calls that can change your life. I had literally be called to join to Liberal party and have politics become part of my experience. I kind of wanted that happen. I had thought about joining the party the previous June in order to vote for Iggy. I’d decided against it, but now it was back as a request.
Because I had a September 13th deadline, I joined the party via the Liberal website on Monday 11 September. (What I has always seemed odd to me was that I never received any form of official documentation stating that I was a member of the Liberal party. I think my membership expired the following year, but I’m not sure). There were forms I was asked to fax. I told my contact that I could easily drop them off at the headquarters.
I did the paperwork and dropped off the forms on Wednesday the 13th at the Ignatieff campaign headquarters on Bloor St. While walking down the street I saw the poster for The Fountain against a building, put there for the film festival, and sparking my interest in seeing it when it was released later that November.
At the headquarters, the girl who I’d dealt with over the phone was pretty and polished and this further gave me thoughts that maybe my life was changing for the better – I’d start to meet really interesting people who are involved with politics rather than the cultural scene. The prospect of going to the convention seemed exciting; I’d have a chance to participate in a small moment of the country’s history, like being at the convention which elected Trudeau.
The delegate election was set for September 30th. I’d emailed my contact at the campaign headquarters asking if I needed to attend, because I had a scheduling conflict – this being that weekend’s Copy Camp at the Ryerson University Campus. I was told it wasn’t necessary.
Personal monetary issues where also on my mind. At the end of September I began what would turn out to be a year-long temp-assignment with TD Bank. With my email-list background, and with a list of Liberals in my riding provided by the campaign, I drafted a letter to them on a notepad during my first day at the bank, while waiting to get settled. I set up the email list on my server but never sent the message, realizing that it really wasn’t worth my time.
Also, I had gotten a phone call from another Ignatieff candidate in my riding who seemed a social-austic. We had a nice chat, and I told him why I was supporting Ignatieff, and when I asked him for his last name, he asked me why I wanted to know. Uh, I don’t know, because it’s polite? (This is what Ignatieff’s is attracting?!) In the end, Gerrard Kennedy’s delegates won, but I didn’t find this out for two weeks. (Professional communication, FTW).
On October 18th, I wrote a friend:
And did I mention before that I was running in the Ignatieff Liberal Leadership campaign as a delegate? The process was the Liberal party members elect delegates to go to Montreal for the convention – the election was Sept 30 and I only found out on Monday [October 16th] that I lost. I was hoping to get 0 votes but I don’t know the tally. I’m just glad I can sort of ignore the Liberal email stuff from now on. My taste of it was not impressive. I thought going to Montreal would be awesome, and was led to believe the whole thing could have been subsidized, but it turns out that wasn’t entirely true. Attending the convention alone cost $1000, and to ’subsidize it’ they suggested hosting a fundraising dinner, where you could get ‘family & friends’ to donate $500 to $25 and have Mr. Ignatieff talk to them afterward. Like any of my family & friends care! And I’d hate to hit them up that way. I got a good impression of how disorganized and unprofessional they were, which was at the same time, not a good impression.
Here it becomes easy to acknowledge the inherent corruption within the democratic process that party politics represents. It is very much a pay-to-play system than in the end cannot truly represent the citizens who do not want or cannot pay to be a part of it.
At some point between mid-October and late-November, I got another phone call from the campaign, asking if I’d still like to go to the convention. I returned the call in the lobby of my building at the TD Centre. Biopic: the scene consists of I pacing while framed by Mies Van Der Rohe’s windows with my Nokia at my right ear; my dialogue: ‘I cannot make the time nor can I afford it, so no, I am not interested in being a delegate in Montreal’. Sound of regret, (and I must say, the evident desperation that I was even being asked) on their end.
Skip now to the first days of December 2006: I watched the convention on CBC that weekend. I remember seeing Bob Rae look amazed when one of the drop-outs came over to his side. I remember seeing the two-channel shot of Ignatieff vs Dion while they awaited the final count, this shot also projected in the convention centre, and thus keeping both men pinned to their chairs while the count was being officiated; the voice-over commentary saying it was cruel. The cruelty being that Stephane Dion had won but they were awaiting the count to be formalized and the announcement prepared. It was known because it word-of-mouthed on the convention floor during the interim. I believe it was Susan Bonar who reported that Jean Chriten was seen checking his Blackberry and showing his wife, who mouthed ‘Stephane!?’
From my Journal, 2 December 2006:
5.17pm, awaiting the announcement of the fourth ballot results. The feeling seems to be that Stephane Dion has won the leadership, but we have to wait and see. I’ve had an underlying anxiety all day, I want Ignatieff to win, but at the same time recognize that he’s too much of a rookie. Dion as Liberal Leader? As a Prime Minister? I’m looking forward to this being over so that I can relax. In September I had such a sense of certainty that Ignatieff would become leader.
Back in September, after I dropped off my papers on Bloor St, I met with a friend and we had lunch. During our talk, I said to him, ‘Ignatieff is going to be the leader. I’ve seen it in my crystal ball’. My crystal ball was off by two years, but it’s evident to me that a hundred years of movies have embedded scripts into our thinking to such an extant that once you get the narrative going, it takes on a life of its own. Michael Ignatieff will be Prime Minister of Canada one day. That was decided in 2004, and the media was seeded with this idea by Peter C. Newman’s National Post piece, and an interview in April 2006 in MacLeans (also by Newman), and a profile in the Globe & Mail (which was reprinted last December).
Gerrard Kennedy and his supporters threw sand into the gears of the story when they backed Stephane Dion. Theirs was an attempt to say that democracy should work on merit and occasionally on surprise, not through elites and backroom deals. I, as a newly minted Liberal under dubious circumstances shrugged. Whatever. We have to live with it, not so bad.
6:32pm – Stephane Dion did win. They dragged out the process so that it was announced at about 6pm; Dion is giving his speech but I have the TV on mute and the left-ear bud in since I’m back to working on the transcription. I’m disappointed that the Liberals didn’t see the potential of Ignatieff but there’s nothing one can do.
Maybe it did turn out so bad. So be it, bygones being what they are. However, my crystal ball did not anticipate a Parliamentary insurrection due to the bastard-politicking of Mr. Harper. Stephane Dion, having “lost” (he did not lose, his party simply didn’t get as many members elected to Parliament as the Conservatives) the election, and bungled a coalition attempt, was forced out, and Ignatieff appointed in his place. Thus, my 2006 vision became a reality. Through a back room deal.
A lifetime of Star Trek (and this is written also in light of the release of the latest movie, which was supposed to be released last December) makes me want to speak of alternative time lines here. The Kennedy-Dion alliance in November 2006 seems to have altered history, postponing Ignatieff’s Prime Ministership by a number of years. And so, as part of this fucked-up time line, we have another election won by Conservatives (which wasn’t supposed to happen in 2008), the attempt at coalition (which is never supposed to happen because politics is so cut-throat to forgo cooperation), and the shut-down of Parliament ahead of schedule last December. That whole ‘crisis’ was a series of avoiding should-have-beens.
Which is to say: had Ignatieff become leader in 2006, I doubt Harper would have ‘won’ another election. But Harper did so in October 2008, and then played the scene wrong and brought down the wrath of Parliamentary procedure. Dion is disgraced, and Ignatieff (who should have been just another candidate this weekend, a replay of the Montreal game) is appointed by the party hierarchy. Dion was supposed to remain leader during this time. Bob Rae and Dominic LeBlanc were supposed to be candidates for the leadership. All this is swept aside. The scripts of a year ago are now trivia in light of the extensive rewrites.
And so, one evening last January while I walked down Yonge St, on my way to catch the streetcar after work, my phone rang with an unrecognized number. It was the Ignateiff campaign calling asking if I’d like to stand as a delegate in Vancouver. By this time I’d already ignored three messages left by them, calling to see if I would be interested (messages which had begun in late December). So, on this call, I told them no. When asked why, I said, because I can’t afford it, I can’t make the time, and it’s just going to be a coronation anyway, so I didn’t see the point.
I found a paper from Grade 11 History yesterday. This evening I typed it up. I’ve just finished reading Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and I’d seen his Travesties last month, so this was a nice coincidental find and refresher. If you had asked me on Saturday about the Irish Revolution I described 17 years ago, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about.
Mentioned amidst some of the commentary was that the House was meant to be closed six days later anyway. Checking Parliament’s website, we see that the sitting days were to continue to December 12th, before breaking for the holidays. So the heavy-handed tactic of shutting down the House rather than face a vote he knew he would lose had the effect of teaching Canadians a new word and giving the politicians some new propaganda to play with for Christmas.
Let us imagine the scenario, had things happened the way they could have.
All comment seems to agree that the Conservative party is being run as a Harper dictatorship. Party members dare not speak out against policy, for fear of the wrath of the dear leader. To say that the maligned Economic Update was ‘Harper’s economic update’ may not be inaccurate. Harper’s Economic Update was delivered on Thursday November 27th. It was to be voted on Monday December 1st. Already by Friday afternoon of the 28th, the talk of Coalition was underway, so that on the evening of that Friday, Harper said he’d push the vote back a week, ‘to give Canadians time to contact their MPs’ and to give everyone a cooling off period. Presumably, Harper was hoping that the extra time was all that was needed to diffuse the growing threat of a Coalition.
Monday December 1st 2008 Anticipated: The Fall of the Harper Government Actual: The news conference presided over by the Liberals, NDP, and the Bloc.
The Coalition talk began to pick up steam. Conservatives had posted a website dictating talking-points to their supporters for call-in radio shows (a Macleanspost on this). The week then is marked by mediocre commentary in the national press, and the dim witted web-comments by Conservative supporters who are typing ’separatists!!!’ and ‘the three stooges’, and other variations of belittlement. Up until the previous week, I used to enjoy checking out Bourque.com for a round-up of Canadian news. This past week, that site devolved into the worst of yellow journalism as it denigrated into an essentially Conservative position.
So, by Wednesday December 3rd, we’re going to be addressed by the Prime Minister. I don’t have a television and was out at the scheduled time at 7pm, so I watched it when I got home from a website. Harper came across as an abusive husband looking to be let back into the house. His see-through charm and television makeup did nothing to convince me that he’s trustworthy. Further, he blatantly tried to exploit the ignorance of the Canadian people, by implying that the Coalition did not have the right to take power, when in fact they do. The response by Dion I have not yet seen. I clicked on it and the video never launched. This was probably because it was late in being delivered. Further, I heard that it’s quality was awful, evident from the screencaps posted on accompanying stories.
All of this only to set the stage for the dramatic visit to the Governor General’s house, where she would either let Harper’s government fall, or suspend Parliament. By noon, the news had come that Parliament was being prorogued.
Monday December 8th 2008 Anticipated: The Fall of the Harper Government Actual: Nothing
… well, as I’m writing this on Saturday the 6th, it may be too soon to tell. But Dec 8th was to be the day of the vote. So let us imagine it had gone ahead. The Harper government falls. Hipsters party on Monday night. But then what? The Coalition would take power only after Harper’s formal visit to the Governor General. He would have had to say to the Speaker that the loss of the vote demonstrates the loss of confidence in the government and he’s therefore be visiting her to ask her to dissolve Parliament and call an election. So, what happened on Thursday the 4th would have happened on the 9th. And then again, the question would have been, does the GG call for new elections, or does she allows the Coalition a chance?
The Coalition attempted to show through its documents and press conferences that it was positioned to lead the government for at least 18 months. This was in order to influence the GG into deciding to give them the chance. So, let’s imagine that she did. Somewhere around Tues December 9th or Wednesday the 10th, the breaking news is the establishment of a Coalition government. Because the hipsters had already partied on Monday, they don’t see the need to do it again.
And so … Parliament shuts down two days later, on Friday the 12th, as was scheduled. Christmastime is now all mixed up with the reality that the Conservatives are mighty pissed off to have been subject to ‘a coup’ and promise to make this special time of year toxic with their blue-branded hatred. Tidings of comfort and joy. Meanwhile, Dion is smiling everywhere and Layton is probably giving good speeches about how great things will be when they get back to Ottawa in January and deliver their throne speech.
All of this speculation is merely to say that the prorogation has probably kept the worst of this process from coming to pass before its time. But that’s not to say I wasn’t angry about it on Thursday.
I’m on record as supporting the attempts at a Coalition. I read somewhere yesterday that the prorogation allows us to test the validity of the coalition. If it falls apart by the end of January, than it was never meant to be in the first place. The events of the past week however suggest that given time, this strength of this grows rather then diffuses. I take comfort in the fact that regardless, Harper’s days as leader of the Conservative party are probably numbered.
Harper must go
My position as a citizen is this: I understand how our democracy usually works, and therefore am as prepared now as I was a month ago to live with a Minority Conservative Government. The only reason this is usually the case is because the Opposition parties always rule out working together. Even on Election night, it was clear that the NDP and the Liberals do not have enough seats by themselves to form a Coalition, and thus need the support of the Bloc.
As for the threat of the Bloc, this remains ridiculous. The Bloc do not scare me at all, I do not think of them as treasonous, and I find all call-outs to National Unity and the subsequent concept of the nation-state to be merely romantic delusion. Especially when they are promoted in web-comments by Conservative idiots quoting their dear leaders, apparently too ignorant not only to think for themselves, but to understand how our system functions.
This country is interesting because of its varied regional interests, not in spite of them. For that matter, the Bloc isn’t like other parties because Quebec isn’t like other provinces. As adults we should be able to live with that. And I think we have for the most part over the past fifteen years.
Let’s review the politics of the past decade and a half shall we? Throughout the 1990s, the Reform/Alliance party essentially was the Bloc’s Anglo equivelant, answering Western interests to the Bloc’s Eastern ones. This Western chauvinism swallowed the Progressive Conservative party ruined by the politics of Mulroney, bought new suits at Moore’s and called itself Conservative. It should be noted here that whatever genuine concerns and progressive ideas were to be found in the Reform/Alliance or the Progressive Conservatives were suddenly negated merely through the use of the Conservative label, as if to say that everyone west of Winnipeg who votes Conservative Party is incapable of believing in a progressive Canada and are born being against gay-marriage.
We should remember that this transformation was facilitated by Belinda Stronach who subsequently ran for them, was elected, but jumped ship when the pie of a Ministership was held under her nose by Paul Martin’s Liberal government. The Liberals then went on to lose an election, and Ms. Stronach found herself offering commentary at the Liberal convention in the fall of 2006. As we have seen, Canadian politics regularly delivers such WTF? moments. She subsequently quit politics, having been exposed as a power hungry go-getter who didn’t really care who was in charge as long as she had a place at the table. That’s not something I blame her for since why play the game just to be a back-bencher?
But it is to say that this game has been insidious, nepotistic, and opportunistic for a while now. Whatever Harper’s saying this week to demonize his opponents, they all understand the sport and their integrity as individuals and as a party is always subject to the hierarchy. If this country was being properly run, Dion wouldn’t be around. Someone would have had the balls by now to put him out to pasture so-to-speak, rather than let him linger on to discredit their position. Hurt feelings on Mr. Dion’s part aren’t supposed to a factor in the equation. That’s how power is exercised. The fact that Bob Rae is now stepping up to talk over Dion shows not only his ambition to lead the party, but also his qualification. Ignatieff’s fence-sitting is casting doubts on his measure as Prime Minister material.
The reason the Conservatives are currently dominant despite the weakness of their official numbers is because they don’t give a fuck about anyone’s feelings, and one can hope that this works out to our collective advantage when they draw the knives for Harper’s back. If not, as Adam Radwanski pointed out, we’re in even bigger trouble than we thought, writing: “If Conservatives are not at least seriously discussing the replacement of Stephen Harper before Parliament returns on Jan 26, he truly has succeeded in creating a cult of personality’. The last thing we need is a Maurice Duplessis holding this country back from the wonder of the 21st Century, as that dictator of Quebec did in the 1950s. However once he died the resulting Quiet Revolution rushed the province from the 19th into the 20th Century within a decade, and tried to follow-through by upgrading itself into a nation-state.
If Harper manages to enforce a nightmare of feel-good 20C Reagan-Thatcher bullshit on us while the US resurrects itself from its social catastrophe, and Europe continues to set an example for what a mostly enlightened society could be, the end result will probably be a dramatic national révolution tranquille in twenty years, by which time the rest of the world will be used to thinking of us as just another one of those third world countries of squandered potential ruled by an idiot. The talent of this country will continue to apply for US-work visas to escape the ignorance of this place. Eventually, Canada could come to resemble the southern United States, too ignorant and stupid to understand the hell we exemplify to others.
In the past I’ve said in conversations that I respected Harper as someone who didn’t seem all that bad. Sure, he’s always come across as a bit of dick, but that was personal rather than professional. After the borderline buffoonery of Chretien and the stammering incompetence of Paul Martin, he brought dignity back to the office on his election in 2006. He seemed genuinely humble and honored by the position. He had respect for the office and it was through that respect that he dignified it. Now, it could be said, the power has gone to his head, and he’s lost perspective. He now feels entitled to be Prime Minister, and fuck all of us who don’t see things his way. I’ll be no longer saying in conversations that he’s not all that bad. To that point, I want to state that I don’t regret defending him against the hyperbole of hipsters, and may continue to downplay their predictably alarmist rhetoric. This country is run best through sobriety, John A’s example notwithstanding.
Harper thoroughly failed at being a Prime Minister this past week. Yes, he failed politically by provoking the opposition parties to rebel. But even more importantly, he failed by exploiting the ignorance of the citizens. This is simply unforgivable. Harper is on record as saying that Canadians know nothing of their country, which isn’t something I’m that inclined to disagree with. The fact that he’s used this to suggest that the Coalition lacked validity, to play up the idea that his government ‘won’ the October election makes him despicable. It’s not scandalous to say that the Canadian population is largely ignorant of their history and of how their democracy functions. It is scandalous that the Prime Minister would seek to use that to his advantage rather than attempt to correct it.
The zeitgeist makes it impossible not to compare his performance with that President-Elect Obama. In February, his speech on race was described as a ‘teaching moment’, a description that rose from his approach to the situation, and from Obama’s background as a law professor. He saw an opportunity to educate and he seized it.
Harper’s opportunity to educate the population was squandered. It’s probably fair to say that he doesn’t care. The talking-points prepared for the minions to call into radio-stations proves that the Conservatives have a vested interest in keeping us mostly stupid. Yet, I don’t feel particularly alone in the country in my awareness that Harper’s a failure, and the talking points website referenced has mostly been presented with a humour suggesting some people can see it for what it is. (I don’t listen to talk radio anyway, so the propaganda effort is wasted on the like of me). The propagation of ignorance includes:
• This is what bothers me the most. The Conservatives won the election. The Opposition keeps saying that the Conservatives have to respect the will of the voters that this is a minority and so on.
…how about Liberals, NDP and Bloc respecting the will of the voters when they said “YOU LOSE”.
• And what’s this going to do to the economy. I’m sorry, I don’t care how desperate the Liberals are – giving socialists (Jack Layton) and separatists (Gilles Duceppe) a veto over every decision in government – that is a recipe for total economic disaster.
• No – do you know what set this off. When Flaherty said he was going to take taxpayer-funded subsidies away from the opposition. Now there is a reason to try and overturn an election– because the Conservatives the audacity to say “Hey, it’s a recession, maybe you should take your nose out of the trough.”
• I don’t want another election. But what I want even less is a surprise backroom Prime Minister whom I never even had the opportunity to vote for or against. What an insult to democracy
The true insult to our democracy is that such a website even exists.
On November 27th, Jim Flaherty (who should be balancing the books of a corner store in Whitby as far as I’m concerned, not the books of the Federal government) stood up to deliver an ‘economic update’. The Opposition parties were looking for an economic stimulus plan. Instead we were warned that he was removing funding from all parties, and in the weeks leading up to this, there were rumours he was considering selling-off Federal government assets in order to raise short-term cash. Again, Obama gives us some insight on what an economic stimulus package might look like. He’s calling for infrastructure investment and retrofitting of government buildings and schools. Things that would actually provide jobs. Our Minority Government is considering selling the CN Tower and wanting to fuck over their opponents.
There is no question why Harper has lost the confidence of the house. The question remains as to who our Prime Minister will be in February. – Timothy
On the weekend I downloaded the results available at Elections Canada and did some number crunching. Thanks to the miracle of the spreadsheet, this was something that only took about a half-hour to do. The numbers remind us that the Conservatives only got 10.4 million votes, while the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc combined got 15 million. Thus Stephen Harper is full of shit, which is pretty much nothing new, as far as many are concerned.
As for talk of an alliance with Separatists, I too think this is bullshit. Since when as the Bloc been a threat? Since 1995, thirteen years ago. Now they are a Quebec chauvinist party who represent Quebec self-interest in the federal government. Given that a lack of representation and fair dealing throughout the 20th Century is what led Quebec to believe they needed to separate, perhaps the Bloc’s place in the House over the past fifteen years has been sufficient to defuse that threat. Yes, on paper, they’re Separatists. Also, on paper, the Pope believes in Jesus. But the Bloc is not a threat, and like the Pope, probably enjoy their political power and influence more than they do their ideology.
Which is exactly where Harper as gone so wrong – trying to mix his power with his noxious ideology. Seventeen million people did not vote for the Conservatives. Seventeen million Canadians rejected their ideals. Yet, with ten million votes, we found them in power. And what a Chomskyian fall – by that meaning their undoing followed Chomsky’s usual analysis that governments get into trouble when they fuck with powerful interests. All through the pre-election Parliament, the Liberals refused to challenge Harper’s regime. This is what earned my disgust with Stephen Dion, not the Carbon Tax. Now that they’ve finally stood up for themselves and for their representatives, I look forward to Dion as a Prime Minister. And yet, it was the threat to remove their public funding which became the straw that broke this camel’s back. Well, whatever. Lets bygones be bygones – the Separatists are not a threat, nor are they treasonous etc. Dion is no longer being pusillanimous. Harper is no longer appearing reasonable and respectable. Bring on the future.
One constitutional lawyer (also a University of Toronto professor), was on Don Newman’s Politics last evening (Mon Dec 1; begins at 11:19). The talk was a lack of historical precedence, in terms of giving this legitimacy. So what? Why does that even need to be a concern? Can’t this Parliament set a precedent? Indeed, this whole scenario is a heartwarming reminder that there are stop-gaps in place to prevent dictatorships and tyrannies. Mind you, that take on it might not be valid if the governing party was in the Majority. Nevertheless, what I saw when watching Layton, Dion and Duceppe’s news conference last evening was history, an historic handshake like similar foundational handshakes in national histories. John Ralston Saul likes to talk about the agreement between Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, and how this arrangement laid the foundations for Confederation. A coalition government at this time could be the foundation of collaborative government which would be appropriate to the networked 21st Century. For all we know, this type of thing could lead to a revised Constitution in fifty years.
Repeated accusations of the parties playing partisan politics, and using the Bloc as a denigration, is entirely missing this point. Big picture, long term, we should have a government where the parties work together, where they represent a multitude of voices and different ideas, and this could free us from rule by one-party ideologues the likes of Harper, or for that matter, the likes of Chretien. Further, the Reform party (from which Harper sprang) found its first members among those who were angry with the Trudeau-era Liberals (who, granted, worked with the NDP during one of their terms). The point here being that breaking one-party majority rules who just piss off a lot of people off is probably a good thing for all. Historians may look at this as an evolution of politics which began with the return to Minority Parliaments after the Chretien years. Minorities which lead to Coalitions which lead to fairer representation at the Federal level. If anything, (and if they can get this right), this may enable future under-represented voices to be heard. And one can hope that amidst the economic stimuli, they find the time to bring in Proportional Representation, since it’s now to their mutual advantage.
In my excitement last night, I posted on as my Facebook status: ‘I am so proud of my parliament right now. This is Canada’s Obama moment. Wow.’ What I meant was that a bold, change-oriented, imaginative thing was underway, which put into contrast the status-quo we are used to. The election of Barack Obama was a result of a majority of Americans consciously choosing a different path, one that lead them into the 21st Century. Obama promises a government of transparency and of networked sophistication.
As Canadians, we aren’t there yet. But a majority of Canadians consciously chose to vote for parties other than the Conservatives, who would never lead us there to begin with. The five million more who voted past the Conservatives ten million will now feel like they’ve gotten the government they were asking for. They (and we, as I was one of them) deserve to be represented, and for our common desire to see a better country given a chance to be implemented.
I drafted the majority of this a couple of weeks ago, in light of the recent announcement of the funding cuts. In the interim weeks, Leah Sandals and Jennifer McMackon have done better jobs than I could have in assembling related links. Also, in the past week, it became increasingly clear that Harper will call an election within the next two weeks, making these controversial cuts and copyright bill null and void unless the Conservatives return to power with another minority or, god help us, a majority.
I live in a riding with an NDP candidate, and I will with good conscious vote to reelect her. Doubly, as a citizen of Toronto, I’m in an essentially Liberal area. For this reason, it has been said over the previous two and half years (since the last election) that the Conservatives have been screwing us over. It has also been said that Harper ideally wants to destroy the Liberal party. Do we really want to have such a petty and vindictive bunch of assholes deciding things for the other 33 million of us? Equally troubling is the fact that Harper grew up in Etobicoke, which is to say, Harper hates his home town. Well, fuck him too, and the scare-mongering flyers I’ve been receiving in my mailbox.
To Take Care of Oneself
As artists, it’s not a question that society owes us a living; to use that phrase is itself problematic – to say use the word owe, suggesting a debt or some other economic transaction.
For me, I go back to my early 20s, having gone through art school and having met and befriended people who in many ways weren’t really capable of taking care of themselves. They were deficient in life skills primarily, but also in terms of coping mechanisms. It wasn’t so much that they were losers or retarded in the legitimate sense of the word, but they were just different, round pegs for society’s square holes. Myself, I’d like to live in a society of difference/variety/heterogeneity. How we deal with the challenges presented by ‘un-normal’ people is one by which we can measure the state of our civilization. Since for me civilization is about the education we provide and acquire to remove ourselves as far as possible from the states of animals (who are fearful, ignorant and cruel), a civilized society is one reflective of communities of care and of elevated compassion: a state present even in animals but which we can nurture and encourage more of as self-aware beings.
In grade school, we had a class of ‘special kids’ who were the ones in wheelchairs, or were borderline blind, or whatever. One girl in particular I remember as probably having cerebral palsy. Because of the area (rural Nova Scotia) this class might have been doubling as a day care (I’m not sure what type of education was being provided) but for the most part, adapting to the needs of these children was taken for granted as the proper thing to do. It taught me that I lived in a civilized society because these people were both cared for and not to be mocked. Through this a sense of compassion was both taught and encouraged.
In my 20s, I learned that some people weren’t able to take care of themselves. And the lesson for me was just because this is so doesn’t mean people should be poor, unemployable and underemployed, nor end up homeless. It should be possible to accept these people and make sure they have homes, enough money for food and clothing and comfortable lives. There’s no need for them to suffer just because they’re different.
Like the disabled children of my community, they should to be taken care of. As a rich society not overwhelmed by the incompetent (I’d guess they’re less than 20% of the population), it should cost peanuts to make sure these people have ok lives. Considering that the real fuck-ups who end of in jail are cared for by the state, investing in keeping the annoying from becoming homeless and moochy shouldn’t be that big of a deal.
Maybe all they need is some kind of compassionate service – a councilor or a social worker. In terms of homelessness explicitly, I’ve heard it said that many are people who would be fine if they had a stable address and a social worker to help them take their medications on time. This doesn’t seem a lot to ask. If we can provide services for those who are not able-bodied, we should also accept that some people are just born different, and that they are just not ‘able-minded’ by what are thought of as society’s norms. 1
There is room for critique as to what constitutes the able-minded, but that is for another discussion. Meanwhile we’ve had plenty of critique of society’s norms, and while that has brought to light these considerations, they haven’t done much to encourage people toward compassion.
People who aren’t capable of fitting-in (to the extent that they can’t take care of themselves in the usually accepted way) just need accommodation and consideration. It isn’t a question of being owed, but of helping people within our community. Those who are physically and congenitally disadvantaged do not argue about being owed a living, but I think they rightfully feel entitled to being treated with respect and dignity.
So, send in the artists, with century old arguments about being owed a living and expecting support from government-funded organizations. What these arguments amount to is artists saying they’re retards who can’t take care of themselves and are essentially hopeless at basic economic management. Given that it was in art school that I began to think about this (as stated), that may be case. However, unlike the trolls commenting on the newspaper-site boards, who are happy with the cuts, I didn’t consider my fellow art-students and graduated artists as losers, but simply different. And so, I’m not very sympathetic to a line of argument that plays into ignorant prejudice among those completely uneducated and insensitive to the arts. The continued begging at government coffers, based on the idea that artists are incapable of surviving without it, seems self-harming and essentially untrue.
On the one hand, artists like to argue that they’re vital to society for all sorts of reasons, but on the other hand, they’re arguing that they’re incapable of functioning within that society. Over here, arguments about the intelligence of art and the superiority of the artist over the corporate clerk, and over there, whining about capitalist exploitation in the Third World while their dealers take 50% of the price of their work. Here a sense of entitlement to government financing, while there, artists who want to be above regulation and censorship while continuing to cash the government cheques.
In a sense, artists have become the ill character of a sitcom who doesn’t want to get better because everyone has become kind and giving toward them. In that manner they’ve degraded themselves and have invited disdain, which by the end of the episode is played for laughs. One of the values of Conservatives is personal responsibility, and the ability to take care of oneself. It thus follows that Conservative governments do not see much value in funding the arts because it’s representative of coddling adults who should be able to self-manage. By arguing that they’re retarded for so long, artists have willfully invited disdain.
Canada is a hard place to live
Sixty years ago, Roberston Davies’ Fortune, My Foe was first performed in Kingston. It contains a line I’ve seen much quoted in arguments reflecting on the development of arts funding in Canada.
Everybody says Canada is a hard country to govern, but nobody mentions that for some people it is also a hard country to live in. Still, if we all run away it will never be any better. So let the geniuses of easy virtue go southward; I know what they feel too well to blame them. But for some of us there is no choice; let Canada do what she will with us, we must stay.
Davies of course did not leave, but stayed and became part of the Canadian cultural legacy. (The internationalism of the film/television and music industries meant that we can still lay claim to those stars who now live elsewhere but who began with Canadian passports). In the years leading up to the 1967 Centenary, Canadians (reflecting a post-war, mid-20th Century modernist mindset as much as anything else) invested in developing a sense of nationalism. The result of this investment is people like John Ralston Saul and Adrienne Clarkson, the only two Canadians left in the media-scape praising Canada as a nation, both old enough to have been young adults at the Centenary, and both now at an age when they just seem like old fuddy-duddies.
The children of their generation is that of my own, kids born in the ’60s and ’70s and in terms of inherited legacies, pot smoking was far more successfully passed on then the spirit of Canadian nationalism. Planted in post-war soil Canadian Nationalism flowered for 1967, was worn in the lapel of Trudeau, then withered and died as is natural for flowers and all other living things. While ambitious and certainly worth the attempt, a government funded attempt at generating an artificial trans-continental consciousness in a place so geographically varied and multicultural is retrospectively absurd and perhaps deserving of it’s demise.
But the 1950s research into this attempt was that of the Massey Commission and the result was the Canada Council. We are told legends by elders of generous funding and ‘National Gallery Biennials’, where every couple of years the National Gallery would ‘define where Canadian art was at’. (src). This was part of the Nationalistic enculturation which produced the likes of Saul and Clarkson. By this early 21st Century, the children of those boomers are much more interested in city-state politics and thinking, founding the likes of Spacing magazine, not really giving a shit about McCleans while mocking Richard Florida even as he legitimizes them to the current crop of out-of-touch establishment.
In his 1993 introduction to a reprint of Fortune my Foe, Davies describes the genesis of the play; after World War II put a stop to touring plays by independent and occasionally American theatre companies, his university friend Arthur Sutherland established a theatre company in Kingston and invited Davies to write a ‘Canadian’ play to complement the repertoire of English and American comedies. In describing this background, Davies defines an artist as ‘a person who enlarges and illuminates the lives of others.’ In commissioning a young Roberston Davies, Sutherland, although aware of the risk…
“…wanted a play about Canada. It was risky because Canada has for a long time been thought a dull country, with dull people. But there was a time when Norway was thought dull, and Ireland was thought absurd, yet both of them brought forth plays which have been acclaimed as treasures by theatres around the world.”
Which reminds me of Norman Mailer’s claim that the economic recovery of Ireland in recent years can be traced to James Joyce. In other words, the capacity of a country to see itself reflected in a work of imagination can both be an ‘enlarging’ experience and also so inspiring to bind a community together. Davies is also claiming that the difference between being considered dull and ‘interesting’ (or cool, in the present sense) is in the nature of one’s self-imagining, and the messages that puts out. If painters of the United States had confined themselves to images of the American Gothic and considered that an accurate self-representation rather than satire, would we not think of the U.S. as dull?
After offering a synopsis of his play, Davies in the ’93 introduction goes on to say that his task was to make the play not too didactic. Within the structure of the play Davies had a character of a puppeteer, a European immigrant, who is sponsored to give a puppet show by the producer characters of Philpott and Tapscott. As Davies explains, the European puppet master was reflective of the recent wave of European immigrants and refugees from devastated Europe, who brought with them Old World sensibilities about art and culture, and were met with a homegrown New World audience who did not share those same ideas.
“Message,” Davies wrote, “was very much on the lips of Canadians like Philpott and Tapscott, the do-gooders who took up the puppet-show, without having any understanding of its special quality or its cultural background, but who were convinced that the task of art was to teach – to offer a Message, in fact, and to offer it in terms that the stupidest listener could understand. Canada was, and still is, full of such people. They think of art of all kinds as a sort of handmaid to education; it must have a Message and it must get across. The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff”.
Is it not the idea that the Conservatives, in government and individually, are people not touched by feeling? Is this not reflected in Jose Verner’s comments that she would like cultural funding to be efficient? Myself, I like efficiency since it’s about doing as much as possible with the least effort – in other words, ‘being lazy is good’ as they say in computer programing, for just this reason.
It is in fact sensible for the government to want to do this. But it is also the case that the government appears to show a disdain for the arts that lie partially in a complacency engendered by funding. Canadian art is rather pathetic and remains so because the infrastructure was set up within a moment of forethought and generosity, and instead of igniting both the imagination and the culture of the country, merely created institutions staffed by people who take the funding for granted and feel entitled within their institutional titles. Instead of fostering culture, they see themselves as beyond petty and quaint nationalistic concerns and instead fly off to Venice every couple of years to hob-nob with the planet’s remaining arrogant aristocrats, shaking away the dirt of the stupid ‘unwashed masses’ of this country who usually live in the neighborhoods the galleries move to. Admittedly, that’s being overly cynical and ignoring the good that many artist-run centres and other galleries do within their neighborhoods (before raising the market-value of neighboring properties by their presence) but such ‘good’ is questionable as a repetition of a colonial mindset that sees certain groups as needing help: bring them civilization and culture; capital-c Culture having replaced Jesus in a secular society.
On July 17th I had no idea that the programs in question even existed, and I’m in the culture business. Which is to say that the gang of young adults who have turned Toronto’s gallery-area Queen West West into another nightclub district probably have never heard of the programs either. Why then should I or they have cared on August 17th? When I didn’t know they existed I didn’t care, and now that I know they exist and may not for much longer I still don’t care that much. In effect, the Conservatives have potentially legislated my mid-July mindset into existence.
In as much as I’ve gotten emails repeating the contents of a new Facebook group, I have a suspicion this may be a lost cause. As evinced by their artist-statements, artists in this country are rarely capable of being eloquent enough to convince Conservatives or the rest of the population of their value. The Conservatives have upset an easily ignored minority, and inspired such comments as:
“when the government stops spending money on endeavours that provide next to no value to the Canadian people it is not pandering, it is good government. Am I the only person in the god forsaken country that remembers we have a fricking health care crisis? Sure, there is an element of pandering, and there is plenty of other funding that should be pulled but will not be, but the simple act of pulling funding from people who never should have received it is a good thing. End of story.” (from)
and
“I think that is what I was getting at. I’m all for supporting the arts but I feel that people of Mr. Lewis’s status and influence should not be receiving money from the government whether he is right or left wing. A friend of mine is an artist and she maintains most of the arts grants go to people who don’t need them. The real starving artists don’t have the influence to affect awards.” (from)
and
“The government is the one entity in the country that is least likely to make an intelligent decision on how to spend money. In fact, the only reasons to access government funding over private are laziness, a desire to be unaccountable for the funds you receive, and the knowledge that the general public sees no value in your product.
The government should contribute to the arts through tax credits alone. This can amount to a large amount of support, ensures there will be a respectable amount of accountability built into the system, and will bring the arts community closer to the community it supposedly serves.” (from)
yet, there is one considered argument:
“Fund the Olympics and not artists? Artists leave something behind for future generations; athletes… well, they’re fun to watch. Someone said independent producers such as Avi Lewis should pay to find their own distributors. Maybe. But then you should be consistent and argue against ALL government economic subsidies and incentives. Let’s stop subsidizing automakers, oil companies, the aerospace industry, etc. For the most part, the organizations and individuals affected here are either completely non-ideological (such as Tafelmusik) or engaging in economic development for Canadian businesses, which employ Canadians (such as the Hot Docs festival’s Toronto Documentary Forum, which among other things, brings foreign investment into Canadian productions). Finally, what’s lost here is that arts and culture have always been an important part of international diplomacy. The Tories are letting their ideology trump the national interest. Shame on them.” (from)
But in regards to Tafelmusik, a baroque orchestra playing on period instruments, they charge between $89 to $15 dollars a ticket. Surely they work a profit margin in there somewhere? Surely those wealthy egotists so eager to have their name immortalized for the a decades on a hospital wing (or listed in platinum lettering in the lobby of retarded new ‘expansions’ ignored by people waiting in line to pay $22 to see largely empty galleries) can find a mil or two to send the Bach to China?
I saw Darren O’Donnell at the Toronto Free Gallery opening last Thursday night and he told me he’d been engaged in the past week with an online debate about the validity of his work with Mammalian Diving Reflex, a debate initiated by Gabriel Moser and picked up on the Sally McKay’/Lorna Mills blog.
I’ve recently moved and had been in no rush to get the net at home set up, a situation further compounded by Rogers’ incompetence (I’m posting this from work dear reader), so this debate had escaped my attention. However, alerted by Darren, I looked up the links at work on Friday and printed off the conversation for some weekend reading. My immediate reaction (especially having converted it to page-length) was ‘wow’ – to the two documents both approximately 20 pages in length. As much as Darren was enervated by the criticism, at least this was a conversation being had.
I met Darren shortly before he began his `social acupuncture` projects, and so I’ve always felt I had an insider’s perspective on them, having participated in and been witness to some of their earlier manifestations. Further, I was at the book launch for his Social Acupuncture (meaning I read it as soon as was possible) and so I have the insight provided by his brilliant essay at the back of my mind with regard to the work.
What Moser and Sandals provide me with is the perspective of someone who doesn’t know Darren personally. Sandals is upfront in admitting she doesn’t like Darren which biases her against the work (src). Another friend of mine admitted that he didn’t quite understand what the work was about art-wise either, but at the time I countered that it was part of our culture’s move away from fiction toward non-fiction (a personal interpretation I worked out somewhat in Goodreads 07w11:1).
I do take issue with one of Moser’s interpretations, since it made me sputter in indignation. I’ve never met Ms. Moser and would like to think we could get along in the future, but I have to nominate one of her paragraphs as one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.
Speaking of the humor of Mammalian Diving Reflex’s work with children, she wrote:
But the pessimistic part of me thinks that the humour actually lies in something far less self-aware and much more sinister. This part – let’s call it the UBC indoctrinated part – thinks that the humour actually comes from a strange and almost colonial kind of child-adult anthropomorphism. That when adults see these kids trying to play grown up, the humour comes from the fact that we think they’re ‘cute’ in a patronizing way – that their inability to successfully inhabit these [adult] roles is funny in the same way that watching a dog awkwardly dressed in a human business suit is funny.
Anthropomorphism is a completely inappropriate concept to apply to children, suggesting that they aren’t part of our species (only adults are truly human ?) but are akin to dogs dressed up. I am surprised that this thought occurred to her, and doubly surprised that she saw fit to publish it. If only UBC indoctrination had taught her to recognize foolishness when it occasionally occurs, even in the best of minds.
I find nothing humorous about the Mammalian Projects, nor does ‘cute’ really enter into it for me. I’m informed by Darren’s ideas about acupuncture – that you’re poking a dam to hopefully collapse it and return the flow – and in this case, Darren is working with our society’s totally fucked up ideas about children. These ideas are so fucked up that a writer doesn’t recognize how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘anthropomorphic’ when speaking of them.
I keep thinking of a passage from Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language. In Pattern 57, Children in the City Alexander wrote:
If children are not able to explore the whole of the adult world round about them, they cannot become adults. But modern cities are so dangerous that children cannot be allowed to explore them freely.
The need for children to have access to the world of adults is so obvious that it goes without saying. The adults transmit their ethos and their way of life to children through their actions, not through statements. Children learn by doing and by copying. If the child’s education is limited to school and home, and all the vast undertakings of a modern city are mysterious and inaccessible, it is impossible for the child to find out what it really means to be an adult and impossible, certainly, for him to copy it by doing.
This separation between the child’s world and the adult world is unknown among animals and unknown in traditional societies. In simple villages, children spend their days side by side with farmers in the fields, side by side with people who are building houses, side by side, in fact, with all the daily actions of the men and women round about them: making pottery, counting money, curing the sick, praying to God, grinding corn, arguing about the future of the village.
But in the city, life is so enormous and so dangerous, that children can’t be left alone to roam around. There is constant danger from fast-moving cars and trucks, and dangerous machinery. There is a small but ominous danger of kidnap, or rape, or assault. And, for the smallest children, there is the simple danger of getting lost. A small child just doesn’t know enough to find his way around a city.
The problem seems nearly insoluble. But we believe it can be at least partly solved by enlarging those parts of cities where small children can be left to roam, alone, and by trying to make sure that these protected children’s belts are so widespread and so-far reaching that they touch the full variety of adult activities and ways of life.
For me, Darren’s work is about restoring the balance of incorporating young people into a community, to break them away from the segregation we enforce onto them through class-rooms and age-based learning. Writing in the 1970s, Alexander hinted that unless children interact with adults, they cannot become ‘adults’ themselves. As a child of the same decade, I recognize the effects the subsequent decades have had on my generation and those that have followed. As Lorna Mills points out in one of her comments:
…brings to mind the late Neil Postman and his wonderful book The Disappearance of Childhood where he, at one point, proposed it was actually adulthood that was disappearing.
For generations we have effectively controlled the community that our children and young adults experience so that they only really know a community of each other. In my case, it was only toward my mid-twenties that I began to make friends with people significantly older than myself.
Now, that’s what I like about the Mammalian projects; that it’s a fuck-you to a society that segregates children and treats them like precious little angels and not human beings. Having watched the 1970’s The Bad News Bears recently, I was struck by how adult those adolescents seemed: they drank, smoked, swore and said offensive things. That’s pretty much how I remember that age range for myself. And yet, in the thirty years since that movie, children are now routinely depicted as being smart-alecky technical whiz-kids, cute and precious and silly, and if Speilberg’s involved, crying for their fucking daddies.
An anti-adult Boomer ideology has infected everything and I know thirty-somethings who proclaim with pride a Peter Pan syndrome (and I’m not talking about Michael Jackson). This is to say that the only valid model of Being now acceptable is the youthful one, which by definition is immature. This indoctrination leads to the belief that it is better to be pre-formed that fully-formed, better to cut yourself off from your full potential as a being, and be happy with the state leading up to it. In art terms, it is better to be a sketch than to be fully rendered.
Yes, I understand the prejudice: that adults are humourless squares. That their spirits are dead and they’ve lost their collective imagination. But I grew up with an understanding that each decade of life offered something unique to experience, and I wasn’t going to settle for the awkwardness and patronization I’d experienced throughout my childhood and adolescence as being all I could expect from life. While adults of previous generations had given the condition a bad name, that doesn’t mean we should refuse to embrace our biological destiny. A little bit of historical awareness should mean we can chose to be a type of adult that suits us. I understand today that there are those who are choosing to be Peter Pan types – fine. I just wish it wasn’t so popular.
ART
As an anonymous commenter pointed out on the Moser post, the projects ‘should be critiqued from a performance art point of view first and foremost, just as a painting would be critiqued. I’d like to see if anyone will actually look beyond the “kids in parkdale” thing and see the thing as art, because the fact that no one has so far (as far as I know) says more about our perceptions and ideologies than Darren’s.’
As art, Darren is working self-consciously working within the Relational Aesthetics stream of contemporary practice. Relational Aesthetics emphasizes events over objects – one goes to the gallery/space to experience something rather than to just see/hear something. Relational Aesthetics as a movement has already jumped the shark according to some, but I think that type of judgment just highlights an allegiance to being trendy. It is valid exploration within our structured society, which often highlights what we take for granted about our relations with one another. For example, Mammalian’s projects highlight that we take ignoring kids and their imagination for granted.
Chuck Close is said to teach his students that ‘if it looks like art, chances are it’s somebody elses’. That is, it’s familiar, established, and probably by consequence unoriginal. Art has become a series of familiar forms, and all it took was Nicolas Bourriaud to write a 114 page book and call it ‘relational aesthetics’ for artsters to stop saying ‘what the fuck’ and be all uncomfortable with the unfamiliarity, and to start exploiting the possibilities of this form of performance and theatre.
In a comment on her post, Moser uses Diana Borsato’s use of tangoing police officers (during 2006’s Nuit Blanche) as something more obviously ‘art’ because she used adults. (Borsato herself weighs in here). MDR’s use of children puts their work (for the 2006 Nuit Blanche, ‘ballroom dancing’) in the realm of ‘community art’. This seems entirely a personal interpretation on her part, but one informed by the familiar and by our privileging childhood as something ‘special’, the same way the drooling kids in our schools were ‘special’ … i.e. not ‘normal’.
That’s not denigrate ‘specialness’ and emphasize ‘normality’. The value of living in a democratic society is the expansion of possibility. When we narrow options and narrow culture to something familiar then we’ve narrowed the possibility of our imaginations. Artists know this intuitively and it’s part of the artistic ideology. The language used often contrasts boring vs. exciting, narrow vs. unlimited, possible vs. impossible, etc. It’s why there are protests against turning studios into condos, and freak-outs seeing gym-thugs in former gallery spaces turned into magazine-layout restaurants. Because a narrow frame of possibility has been drawn around something that was once more vague and voluntarily undefined.
We are still at a point socially where we don’t know how to recognize what ‘drooling kids’ have to offer, and prefer to shape people into suits, give them Blackberries and expect them to buy a house or a condo. If they jump through the required hoops to adopt ‘the form’ then it doesn’t matter if their lives are empty of meaning. All that’s important is that they look like they have something to offer (even if what they end up offering is 40+ hours of their lives a week to make their bosses’ lives easier).
(Moser points out that Canadians don’t like to talk about class, but it’s a North American and Commonwealth phenomenon – an aspect of colonial legacy. Class is part of the human psyche, and it’s an achievement of post-colonial civilization to down-play it, and a failure to see it become resurgent. Just as taught hygiene keeps certain diseases away, it’s representative of educational failure when a type of psychological typhoid manifests itself again.)
Thus, good art should bring us unfamiliar experiences. (Although, I have to say here, I’m pissed off when artists seem to chose to bring us negative unfamiliar experiences, emphasizing the disgusting and annoying as if that is somehow worth experiencing). Good art should help make us aware of the variety of possibility.
But the definition of Art itself has become too narrow to fully incorporate the explosion of creativity that we have been made aware of through the internet. Consider that in less than two years, an entirely new dialect has been created through the captioning of funny cat pictures. Oh Hai! This wasn’t controlled or planned, but just happened … through humour and through our innate sense of how (our) language works. In as much as I’m an old fashioned humanist, I am so because human beings remain consistently surprising and creative. And the arts have remained valuable and evolved away from Van Gogh landscapes into rice-cooking because in the past century, specialization and over-rationalization have become ideological, to the point that structure is confused with form and appreciated over content. We are a civilization in love with the shape of bowls, but care little about what fills them. Thus, we have edible items without nutritional content, bodies trained to exert forces unrequired for playing video games, and photographs in closets mocking the way we looked twenty years ago. And, an artist once known for filling bowls now gets away with closing doors with walls, a form contrived to evoke content forty-years out of date.
Art schools are schizophrenically complicit in this: while they teach future artists to be critical of the shapes of society, they also expect artists to fit into these shapes, to make familiar art while attempting to make unfamiliar art as well.
Perhaps it is no wonder that so much contemporary art is as bad as it is. When I was recently graduated, I used to tell myself and others that it was impossible to suck, since the anarchism on display in galleries was impossible to judge. But we still want to judge it, we want to be able to say ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and that means we each need some personal standard. What I’ve learned in the years since graduating is that artists do indeed have personal standards, and for the most part, the cliques within the art communities come together around a shared standard … but this is unpredictable, and often dependent on who one’s teacher was at whatever particular school one went to.
This insight has discredited cultural criticism for me. It is an incompatible position to want cultural anarchy as an allowance of possibility and an expansion of potential inspiration, and at the same time to want culture narrowed to the familiar and the immediately comprehensible. Personally, I haven’t quite got that down yet, and still get pissed off in galleries when I see easy work that looks like it’s wasting my time.
But I understand this duality exists in my mind because I’m a person born into the late 20th Century and seeking an expanded open future in the 21st. I am trying to unlearn 20th Century culture and learn the 21st Century one. Which is to say, I’m trying to reject the shit of the past in order to be a type of person which I feel would fit the 21st Century world that I want to live in. The 20th Century narrowed possibilities to binary check-boxes: apocalypse or utopia; 1 vs. 0, employed vs. unemployed, male vs. female, businessman or hippy, movie vs. theatre … etc. A little bit of history shows that people didn’t always live that way.
So, all this being said, I’ll sum it up this way: the Mammalian Diving Reflex projects are awesome, they’re fun, and they’re Darren’s admitted attempts to change his world by expanding his own horizons. Some people don’t get it and they’re allowed to. Some people don’t get it because they’re trying to fit a round peg into the art-world’s square hole. I get it in an idiosyncratic way that I hope I’ve shared, and in so doing hope that I’ve helped illuminate something for others. – Timothy
I just found this laying around the hard-drive. It’s something I wrote at the beginning of February, meant as a reply posting on a web-forum before I abandoned it as too long and potentially off-topic. I also read it now and think it dates me as a 30-something pre-Millennial with 20th Century memories. I’m not so sure the sentiments herein expressed would resonate with early 20-somethings who hate old art as being too much Church-stuff. I’m also not sure how many 20-something artists are dealing with legacy-Marxists on a regular basis, as I have over the past decade.
***
One of the lessons of the 20th Century was that the world changes every ten years. Each decade compressed the changes of a mediaeval century, and yet the arts don’t seem to have clued into this. My reason for pursuing the arts came from it’s humanism, as expressed especially in the 1960s, which I now recognize as being part of the Western World’s healing process following World War II. As a teenager, the Time-Life series on artists produced at that time were an introduction to a cultural world that I was not being taught in my rural Nova Scotia school.
The humanistic aspect of the arts is still what politicians and journalists are likely to throw at us – the arts encourage ‘life’ with mystical overtones. I now understand why that was propagated in the years following the Second World War, but by the time I went to art-school (following the idea that a cultured life was the one the most worth living) I ran into bitter and disagreeable adults who hated the word `beauty`, hated the word `humanism`, and instead taught me to be angry with capitalism, patriarchy, corporations and the other suspects. Thus enraged, I was then encouraged to express my thoughts on the matter through obfuscation, conceptual trickery, (and those other usual techniques) not in writing – since I was expected to be only barely literate – but my making something to be exhibited in a plain white room.
Once out of art school, I thought of myself as a young professional trained in my field and yet found that income-via-arts-employment was rare, the already-expensive credentialing inadequate, and the grant system to be more of a nepotistic lottery, and no one was as smart as they thought they were; more or less they were merely quoters, not thinkers. Old ideas, not new. As long as they could throw a quote at you from one of those bitter French men (they who hated capitalism, humanism and the usual) then they considered themselves not only smart, but superior, and it didn’t matter if their day jobs did not coincide with their training. We were all channeled into a bohemian life of obscurity and intellectual self-deception.
My sense then is that the arts professionals of Canada have totally lost track of the game. They are very quick to adopt the thinking of foreigners while denigrating their home culture. Their greatest ambition is to leave the country. Trained to be hateful of contemporary society, they are too disagreeable to be employable by the corporations who could use them. And here it comes back to the humanistic heritage – your average person who respects the arts does so because of that humanistic heritage, and yet the too-cool-for-school artist today will quickly mock this superficial understanding.
Why then, is there little art is schools? Perhaps because ’sensible’ adults don’t want their kids around the bad influence of either hippy-dippy mystics or disgruntled communists. Those of us who understand why that is an oversimplification and an unfair stereotype are the ones who probably already have their kids involved in the arts. They’re not as rare as we may think, and highlights the political thinking against universalizing art education – politicians think parents-who-want-it find a way outside of the public system. It’s a lifestyle option, and an ethnically specific one at that.
My own, disillusioned sense, is that the arts do not have the value invested into them by 19th Century European snobs. I never use the word `disinterested` for example, except when talking Kantian aesthetics. The writings of John Ruskin I find to be mostly unreadable due to being obsolete. Clement Greenberg, nor Andy Warhol, ever heard the word ‘email’ in their lifetime, let alone ‘world-wide-web’. For that matter, Warhol never got the chance to use Photoshop.
Industrial manufacturing has given us a world of aesthetically pleasing products, and talent for image making is now found in the worlds of design and illustration. (Jutxapoz magazine). Installation art tends to amount to bad set design, and performance art to bad acting. I see better art videos on YouTube than I do in galleries, and on YouTube they don’t try to be art. If you consider the Mona Lisa to be the first viral image, it’s easy to extend the consideration to how much a viral video has passed the test of the audience, making it legitimate art.
These are examples of how our world has changed, and I feel like ‘the visual arts’ are a fossilized cultural product from at most, the 1980s. Future historians will look to illustration, design, and films to gauge our culture, and especially the YouTube archives. Like the photography of a century ago, it’s the stuff taken with Kodaks that are of interest, not the stuff trying to imitate romantic paintings.
If we want to have galleries in our towns and cities, it is important that we all understand why they are important. I still value art for it’s humanism. But our culture is so creative outside of galleries, and it is this creativity that is accessible to people who haven’t studied art. The argument shouldn’t then be to have an art for those professionals – it should be accessible to all. A life in the arts should broaden one’s possibilities, not narrow them to the life of a clique.
When people talk about `art` these days, I no longer know what they’re talking about. I suspect they are talking about some hipster club they don’t want a corporate dork to join. But that exclusion denies someone who needs art is their life from having it – and the result is Canadian culture in 2008.
There are two types of artist I know: those who love the council-system and those who dislike it for encouraging ‘safe’ work.
I’m of the latter sort. My feelings are that the council system is made up of juries who are into one particular type of art. So, the assumption being that if you’re a painter specializing in the type of portraits and landscapes appreciated by grandmothers, you don’t have a chance of getting a grant. The so-called ‘safe’ work is whatever’s hip, and that’s impossible to pin down from year to year: it’s a fashion, it moves through communities as people imitate one another, it’s original source unknown and unimportant. In today’s globalized culture, the determination of what’s hip is dominated by bigger players, and is probably documented and originated in magazines like Artforum rather than C Magazine. (That’s a specifically visual-arts reference. There was a blurb I saw on a TV news channel scrawl saying that hip-hop is the least well funded of the all the art genres by the Canada Council, and yet hip-hop is obviously the most relevant music genre to most young people. The evident bias there is an example of my point).
I got a couple of grants in my time, and I appreciated them. They allowed me to execute projects without having to invest my own money, of which I had none. Looking back, I’m not sure if these projects meant much to society as a whole, which is why I no longer take the ‘art is important to society’ argument too seriously. I’ve come to think of art as something more private and personal. And I feel I make more money working than I would by relying on the hand-outs of grants and prizes. I dislike the current-system of cultural funding as it exists, but I wouldn’t support scrapping it altogether.
What I don’t like about this type of ‘taxpayer bitching’ is how the ‘angry conservative’ stereotype falls into ‘I don’t want them spending my money…’. I’ve always found this reason to be nonsense. I don’t understand why we don’t teach people to think of taxes as that salary we citizens pay toward the functioning of the state. Imagine if employers started saying, ‘I don’t want you spending my money on drugs, or drunken weekends, or McDonald’s hamburgers, or home stereo systems, or …’ etc. Employers know where to draw that line in minding their own business. We in turn should trust our governments to spend their funding responsibly, and when, as often happens, it is exposed that they haven’t been doing so, there should be scandal, there should be apologies and firings, and we appreciate the reforms that follow. Corruption should never be the norm, but it should never be unexpected either. ‘Show me a completely smooth operation,’ Frank Herbet wrote in one of his Dune novels, ‘and I’ll show you a cover up. Real boats rock.’ 1 In other words, human beings are never perfect, and we shouldn’t expect that.
It should not be the case however that the citizen comes to think of culture as an irresponsible expenditure, and yet that has been allowed to happen within my lifetime. We, as a first world nation, can afford to encourage the imagination. God knows we need to in this country.
We pay taxes and we expect a functioning public service and stable infrastructure in return. We aren’t the United States with a military industrial complex, wherein the government subsidizes global violence. We could instead have a cultural-industrial complex and the most we’d have to suffer is visual pollution and bad music, but it would be preferable to a painful and ugly death. Of course, this isn’t on the table because the money is currently in War, and so when we hear talk of Canadian governments trying to attract investment in science, we should ask, science for what? The fact that the Cdn Gov blocked the sale of MDA to land-mine-manufacturing ATK this past week shows that we aren’t immune to such questions and considerations.
When we are told triumphantly that the provincial and/or federal government is running a budget surplus, it is evident that they could be doing much more for the citizens. Unfortunately, a penny-pinching mentality has taken hold, which may be useful as private citizens (I’m currently in a penny-pinching mode myself) but I’m not sure it serves the public interest. If anything, governments should be more forthcoming about their plans for a surplus. Paying off some debt – fine. But holding on to it indefinitely? Not so fine. Are you trying to accumulate interest on the monies so that it grows further? Ok, sure. But when are we going to get a day-care system, and a guaranteed income, and bigger minimum wages, and fatter old-age pension cheques, and investment in affordable housing, better and more frequent public transit, lower tuition rates, cancellation of student-loan debt, and on and on…?
The government still seems to think that its constituents are ignorant people with personal attachments to numbers on pay-stubs who can somehow magically trace those exact numbers into the pockets of the so-called welfare mom all pissy because they’ve been legislated into civilized compassion. Soupcoff echoes this argument when she says ‘Canadians are accustomed to having their money transferred from their own bank accounts to those of the nation’s broadcasters, sculptors and poets.’ Soupcoff then plays a class-card, by writing, ‘Government funding ensures that every time these affluent aesthetes sit down to hear a live piano concerto, they enjoy a nice subsidy from lower-class taxpayers, who are sitting at home reading their Harry Potter books and listening to their Nine Inch Nails CDs. It just doesn’t seem fair.’
I for one have been to a live piano concerto, and that was when I could afford it under the TSO’s program of selling $12 tickets to those under 30. Since I’m now over 30, I haven’t been to the TSO in four years. I did however buy the latest Nine Inch Nails CD this past week, to listen to when I want a change from the classical music I used to stream from CBC 2 and which I now get from alternative outlets like Classical 96.3 or icebergradio.com. My personal example here to say that there’s room in life for both Harry Potter and Tolstoy, and that Nine Inch Nails is actually pretty good.
Class-based access to culture is the result of both education and pricing. But it’s also a question of interest. So what if some people just aren’t interested? I’m not interested in Harry Potter (I haven’t read any of the books or seen any of the movies) and in this binary I’m lucky: this makes me look like I made ‘the right choice’ to people like Harold Bloom, who would be happy to see me reading Macbeth if I was interested in magic. But if millions are loving Harry Potter, clearly I’m missing out on something. It’s just a question of taste. (And while Bloom has a point in questioning it’s literary value, life needs the occasional piece of candy).
Greater funding should translate in greater accessibility. The reward of the arts should be available to all. This argument justifies libraries: publicly funded knowledge made accessible. Would Soupcoff suggest we shut down all libraries because people can buy whatever books they want at Indigo/Chapters? My understanding is that type of argument would have been made in the 19th Century, when publicly funded childhood schooling was considered controversial. But we’ve come to take democratized education and accessible knowledge for granted. We are in the process of achieving a future society where the arts will also be taken for granted and be thus ensured against this type of financial short-sightedness. But we are not there yet.
Perhaps it needs to be said that the argument for ceasing funding was allowed to take hold because the arts were allowed to become incomprehensible. (It did not have to be that way, but that is past. The mistake is allowing it to continue).
To that end, Marni Soupcoff and I agree that, “The decision about what to watch — American Idol or A Beachcombers Christmas — should be one people make for themselves,’ but we do not agree that, ‘[it is]not one the government makes for them (or at least tries to: Despite its best efforts, the government still hasn’t succeeded in getting more than a handful of us to watch CBC television, even if we do pay for it).’ The Government doesn’t make us to anything. As for the CBC, our ‘failure to watch’ is indicative of the corporation’s mismanagement and cultural stupidity. They thought we wanted to watch ‘The One‘.
The traditionally called Higher Arts are more often than not rendered distasteful by being poorly taught, and those like myself who pursue them do so either because they weren’t taught at all (as in my case; no opportunity was taken to ruin them for me) or because the person has a inexplicable passion for them (which also used to be true in my case). Soupcoff: ‘But let’s be honest — who makes up the majority of the audiences of symphonies, art galleries and ballets? It’s middle-class and rich people who can afford to pay for their own entertainment.’
I hate ballet and I don’t understand why Karen Cain is a house-hold name and Jeff Wall is not. Nor, for that matter, why Rex Harrington’s retirement made it onto the CTV news in 2003. But it doesn’t bother me that it’s funded. I went to art school because I wanted to study the arts. For that I was seen by my conventional friends as being weird. I think it’s weird that Toronto has a ballet school, but that’s just to say I sympathize with its potential students, and I’m glad I live in a society where young girls who want to destroy their feet and starve themselves for the pleasure of jumping into the arms of a gay man have a place where they can go and feel welcome. In other words, it’s nice that people have options when it comes to doing something with their lives. And whatever encourages the broadening of those options is a good thing, even if it does to some seem weird.
To that end, we have the arts: it is the realm of imagination where alternative ways to think and live one’s life are fostered. For example, we have been progressively moving toward a more peaceful and ‘civilized’ (in the mannered since of the term) soceity2, inspired by the examples offered to us in movies and novels. Consider how Star Trek‘s universally acknowledged attraction is it’s vision of a future of inclusion and peace-on-Earth. But Star Trek is an American show and offers an American vision of an American future. If the CBC were living up to its mandate, it would support a Canadian future-based program, to give us some sense of what our future might be like. History is necessary, the present is obvious, but what kind of world are we moving toward? A valid question. We have too many future scenarios that offer dystopias, and we need more utopian ones to inspire us. This is not a job that funding ‘math and science’ will do for us. If the math-n-science is to take us to the Moon and Mars, ask where the idea of going off-world came in the first place.
On the April 7th 2008 episode of TVO’s The Agenda, Steve Paikin asked former Ontario Finance minister Greg Sorbara how high the arts rated in the government’s priorities:
Steve Paikin: Honestly, honestly, how high up the ladder are cultural institutions in the Minster of Finance’s play-book?’ Greg Sorbara: During my time they were really high up. SP: They’re not education, and they’re not health care. GB: You know what, they are what creates a healthy city and they are the way in which we educate ourselves. But the fact is, the future of this city and of this region is in arts and creativity and the production of those arts and the dissemination of that creativity. (Mp3 at 14:50)
Sobera’s answer was wonderful, but I think it could have also been answered this way: ‘what’s the point of having health care and education if you’re going to spend your life bored?’
Daniel Richler once described Mike Harris and Ralph Klein as examples of educational failure, and since hearing him say that 3 I’ve always kept that in mind. The people who Marni Soupcoff is pandering to are educational failures. I don’t care what kind of credentials an MBA or the like amounts to if your indifference to the arts has become openly hostile, and if you’re prone to use words like ‘loser’ when thinking of them. If that’s the case, your education has been no such thing. If you managed to go to university, you paid for your job training and partially subsidized your voluntary lobotomization. An educated person can be indifferent to the arts, but they should at least recognize their value.
As I’ve written, I’m not that much of a fan of the arts-councils. But I support public funding of culture. I just think the process could use reformation. If the Canadian Council was able to fund Soupcoff to go on a self-education sabbatical during which she expose herself to what the best of human beings have been able to achieve, perhaps she might be grateful. However, you can lead the horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Or, as I’ve heard recently, ‘you can cure ignorance but you can’t cure stupid’.
I’d like to see politicians and journalists start pandering to this societies’ educated rather than to its stupid.
__________________
1. Chapterhouse Dune, 1985, p. 119
2. My position is that the democratic deficit is to blame for increasing violence: governance is disconnected from the citizens who want more social services and less military spending.
3. On the defunct CBC Friday night program out of Vancouver; name of which I don’t remember, circa 2002
November in Canada is a season of two contradictory impulses. The first is the Massey Lectures, a series of five one hour lectures delivered on CBC Ideas for a work-week sometime during this month. The Massey Lectures to me represent some of the better characteristics of our species: the desire to not only grow in knowledge, but to communicate it as well. This lecture series invites the so called expert to break down the professional linguistic barriers that too often separates them from a broad audience.
The Massey Lectures used to invite scholars and writers of international habitation, but since the mid-nineties have focused on Canadian speakers, highlighting how much excellent thinking is being done by Canadians. My own excessive fondness for the work of John Ralston Saul stems from his delivery of the 1995 Massey Lectures, and my support of Michael Ignatieff’s quest for the Liberal leadership (and the subsequent eventual likelihood of Prime Ministership) comes from his 2000 Lectures (and in that case, it wasn’t so much the content of his talks, which was on human rights, but the fact that Canada deserves to have a Prime Minster who’s intelligent enough to have delivered the talks in the first place). Other past notables of the Massey Lectures include Charles Taylor (who delivered the 1991 Lectures) and Northrop Frye (in 1962; the series The Educated Imagination I consider to be essential reading).
Prior to the can-con, Noam Chomsky taught us about the media-as-propaganda model in 1988, and Dorris Lessing taught us about ‘the prisons we live inside’ in 1985. Lessing’s lectures were re-published by the House of Anansi Press last year, just in time for this year’s Nobel win to spike sales, and I picked up my copy the other day.
This brings me to the other side of Canadian November, and that’s the poppy. This is the impulse which contradicts our desire for knowledge (that desire to grow as individuals and as a species) and that is the desire for barbaric violence. The poppy sentimentalizes what should be considered simply shameful. How can its motto of ‘lest we forget’ still be said after 90 years of more war after that ‘war to end all wars’? It’s shame should be apparent in this embarrassment.
This year I’ve decided to boycott this emblem of remembrance, because I’m tired of war, I’ve had an ear and eyeful from the news all year and I want nothing to do with it. I don’t support the troops, I think Western governance has gone on a patriarchal war-is-glory bender and whatever threats exist are only exaggerated to promote the real agenda, which is an ancient Roman ideal of glory in death, destruction, and the vanquishing of enemies. Fuck all of that.
In her first lecture twenty-two years ago, Lessing brought up the unspoken facet of violence and war which she had witnessed in her lifetime, and that was that war was for many people fun. She opens her talks with a tale of a farmer who’s expensively imported bull had killed the boy who took care of it, and that this farmer decided to kill the bull because in his mind it had done wrong. She also tells of the post-WW II symbolic trial and ‘execution’ of a tree that had been associated with General Petain. Lessing points out that the farmer’s actions, and the villagers who destroyed a tree, were irrational, acting out of symbolism but not sense. As she says, ‘I often think about these incidents: they represent those happenings that seem to give up more meaning as time goes on. Whenever things seem to be going along quite smoothly – and I am talking about human affairs in general – then it is as if suddenly some awful primitivism surges up and people revert to barbaric behavior.’ Later, she writes:
To return to the farmer and his bull. It may be argued that the farmer’s sudden regression to primitivism affected no one but himself and his family, and was a very small incident on the stage of human affairs. But exactly the same can be seen in large events, affecting hundreds or even millions of people. For instance, when British and Italian soccer fans recently rioted in Brussels, they became, as onlookers and commentators continually reiterated, nothing but animals. The British louts, it seems, were urinating on the corpses of people they had killed. To use the word ‘animal’ here seems to me unhelpful. This may be animal behavior, I don’t know, but it is certainly human behavior, when humans allow themselves to revert to barbarism. […] In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course there are others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that I think is not often talked about. (p.15-16)
It is my sense, as noted above, that the Western world has not grown out of the immaturity of its violent, Imperial and Roman past. It used to be the comparison between the United States and Rome was a metaphor, and it has now become an analogy. It can be argued that since the Renaissance the Western project has been the resurrection of the Roman political state.
There is a reason why Roman dramas are part of our televisiual schedules, and that the actors speak with English accents, and that reason is simply that to a contemporary audience at mid-20th Century, when these dramas began to be made, the English accent was associated with Empire, but we still have not shifted to Roman dramas of American accents. Perhaps that wouldn’t be ‘exotic’ enough. Perhaps because American Empire is Robert Duval saying he loves the smell of napalm in the morning, or a cowboy falling on a nuclear weapon, or Nicholson telling us we can’t handle the truth. A Roman drama with American accents wouldn’t work because we associate American Empire with a vulgar New World technological advantage and Ancient Rome still sounds better in an Old World voice.
Cue Dante. This is written as an introduction to the link below, a discussion on Dante’s Paradiso, a recent translation of which has just been published. I’ve tried to read the Paradiso more than once over the past few years and always find it extremely boring, and that’s part of my point. There is a reason why the dark, violent, Hell-Vision of Dante is more often translated, more often talked about, more often borrowed for a cinematic vision. Because we are still barbarians. Resurrecting Rome while still caught in a Dark Ages mind-set that likes all this violent shit. (Beowulf anyone?).
And yet, seven hundred years ago, in the midst of that Middle Age between the light of Empires, a man imagined Heaven. It has been said that this alone should be heralded, as a supreme accomplishment of the human imagination. And that is why I’ve tried to read and appreciate it. Because it represents something other than violence and darkness, and if we find it boring, it’s because we still allow ourselves to be thrilled by cruelty and brutality. We still pay money to see digital humans ripped apart by monsters, fake blood flying everywhere. The Romans had least had the balls to do it for real, they didn’t try to hide behind our ’special effects’ which somehow is supposed to do two things: maintain a moral vision of human worth (which is continually contradicted by the cruelties in the news) and prevent us from seeing the dubious morality of being entertained by violence.
And so, a conversation on Dante during the season of Ideas and poppies. – Timothy
The Case of MB
On 25 November 2006, a Montreal blogger posts the following on his site. Although many of us know exactly who the characters involved are, because of the subsequent legal action I’ve decided it’s best to remove the names. Our Montreal blogger will be referred to below as MB.
Howdy!
According to this article, a guy named [A] was in business with [B], who tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec. Because of him, a bunch of different police forces here in Canada started to investigate the Mafia for something like five years, and resulted in them arresting a gazillion and a half people on Thursday.
This might even be a better story than [C].
This was basically a link-out to an article in the National Post which had been published the day before. The article was about A, a car dealer who police claimed was involved with a crime family. Word on the street had it that B was a business partner with A, and that A had stolen paintings from B, as B is a gallery owner. B was actually in business with A’s wife, not A himself.
The subsequent legal action mentioned above was that B sued MB for defamation, because of the above post. Let’s read it again:
According to this article, a guy named [A] was in business with [B], who tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec.
According the National Post article, A was in business with B, and B tried to sell some fake paintings to Loto-Quebec. This relates to an even older story from 2003, and is of little consequence here. The defamation in question comes about in the following sentence:
Because of him, a bunch of different police forces here in Canada started to investigate the Mafia for something like five years, and resulted in them arresting a gazillion and a half people on Thursday.
By beginning his sentence with ‘Because of him’ the implication is that he’s referring to the last person named in the previous statement (B) when in fact he’s referring to A. This leads to the legal action, which is initiated in April, when Mr. MB received the first cease-and-desist notification, which apparently asked for the post to be corrected, clarified, or deleted.
My sense is that complying would have been reasonable, except that MB got his back up about it all and ended up deleting his blog. All because of an unclear sentence structure, and the use of the controversy for a relentless self-promotion campaign of interviews with mainstream media organizations.
Fueled by claims of censorship and a lack of free speech, the angle was always that of the little guy being bullied by people with enough money to afford to drag the matter before the courts. This publicity simply exacerbated the situation.
Again, this is simply the result of bad writing, and the real lesson here is not one of censorship, but that one should be clear about one’s references. MB was simply trying to summarize something that had been published by a national newspaper, but in doing so implied not only an association with the party being investigated by police, but the actual offenses supposedly perpetrated by that person. B had every right to ask for the posting to be clarified or deleted.
Email
A book has now been published as a manual for email, and in it’s review, Janet Malcolm quotes the following examples, described as the correspondence between an executive ‘at a large American company in China’ and his secretary:
You locked me out of my office this evening because you assume I have my office key on my person. With immediate effect, you do not leave the office until you have checked with all the managers you support.
To which the secretary replied:
I locked the door because the office has been burgled in the past. Even though I’m your subordinate, please pay attention to politeness when you speak. This is the most basic human courtesy. You have your own keys. You forgot to bring them, but you still want to say it’s someone else’s fault.
Her reply was cc’d to everyone in the company. ‘Before long,’ write Malcolm, ‘the exchange appeared in the Chinese press and led to the executive’s resignation’.
I’m glad to see the executive ended up losing his position, not the secretary. But again, this is the result of bad writing. The executive was probably ignorant of the tone he was conveying with his sentences. His use of the word ‘you’ four times, and the condensation of his instructions into two sentences comes across as curt and unfeeling. The secretary reads it as such, and accuses him of being impolite.
The executive, having risen to the top of ‘a large American company’ must be well versed in the technocratic language of our time. His secretary made the reasonable assumption that he had the wherewithal to carry his own keys, and I’m making the assumption that he’s illiterate – not in the sense that he cannot read or write, but in the sense that he’s not conscious of the effect of his (or the) written word. But then again, one email is not enough to go on for that conclusion: he may have been having a bad day, he may have already been angry about something else, he may have had a company wide reputation for being an asshole to begin with and so on.
Another example from the review clearly implies the executive in question is an asshole:
In this case, the secretary spilled ketchup on the boss’s trousers, and he wrote an email asking for the £4 it cost to have the trousers cleaned (the company was a British law firm). Receiving no reply, he pursued the matter. Finally he—and hundreds of people at the firm—received this email:
Subject: Re: Ketchup trousers
With reference to the email below, I must apologize for not getting back to you straight away but due to my mother’s sudden illness, death and funeral I have had more pressing issues than your £4.
I apologize again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary.
Having already spoken to and shown your email…to various partners, lawyers and trainees…, they kindly offered to do a collection to raise the £4.
I however declined their kind offer but should you feel the urgent need for the £4, it will be on my desk this afternoon. Jenny.
Considering my subject here is what is conveyed by writing, I want to point out that both of these examples convey that the top of the corporate pyramid is inhabited by less-than-human individuals, both male, and both wanting to defer responsibility to their female underlings. One could have clearly carried his keys, while the other could have clearly afforded to cover the cost of cleaning his pants. It is precisely this type of basic inconsideration which fuels the protests against globalized capitalism.
Do Not Consume
My third example comes from a story reported last spring, in which Health Canada attempted to warn people not to drink the water on certain Native reservations. (I’m disgusted by the need to write that sentence, btw: ‘bad water on native reservations’. What century am I living in?)
Health Canada says it plans to revamp its communication strategy about drinking water in aboriginal communities after finding out that its warning ads are not working.Federal Health Minister Tony Clement said Thursday a study has found that its public service announcements, which come in the form of signs and posters, are not clear or effective.
“You live and learn in these things,” Clement said in Ottawa.
Because it was too hard to write, ‘Don’t drink the water’ (that would have been too human, too unprofessional) the signs were written thus:
Do Not Consume Advisory
‘According to the study,’ (study!) CBC reported, ‘residents did not know if the sign referred to their tap water or if the advisory was just a suggestion’.This links back to the example of the executive in China. Corporate language has to be cold, unfeeling, imprecise, technical. The technical aspect is the most important, because it conveys the delusion that one is scientific, and as John Ralston Saul argued with Voltaire’s Bastards, we live within the social cult of Reason. Everything should be as emotionless as an equation.Saul wrote in The Unconscious Civilization (p. 48-49):
In a corporatist society there is no serious need for traditional censorship or burning, although there are regular cases. It is as if our language itself is responsible for our inability to identify and act upon reality.
(Think of how MB is complaining of being censored, when he apparently couldn’t see how his sentence structure could be so misconstrued).
I would put it this way. Our language has been separated into two parts. There is public language – enormous, rich, varied and more or less powerless. Then there is corporatist language, attached to power and action.
(Do Not Consume Advisory)
Corproratist language itself breaks down into three types. Rhetoric, propaganda and dialect. […] For the moment let’s concentrate on dialects. Not the old-fashioned regional dialects, but the specialized, inward looking verbal mechanisms (I’m avoiding the word language because they are not language; they do not communicate) of the tens of thousands of monopolies of fractured knowledge. These are what I would call the dialects of the individual corporations. The social science dialects, the medical dialects, the science dialects, the linguist dialects, the artist dialects. Thousands and thousands of them, purposely impenetrable to the non-expert, with thick defensive walls that protect each corporation’s sense of importance. […]
The reliance on specialist dialects, indeed the requirement to use [them], has become a universal condition of our contemporary elites. …
But the core of the disease is perhaps to be found in the social sciences. These often well-intentioned, potentially useful false [emp mine] sciences feed the dialects of the public and private sectors. […] Economists, political scientists and sociologists in particular have attempted to imitate scientific analysis through the accumulation of circumstantial evidence, but above all, through their parodies of the worst of the scientific dialects. As in business and governmental corporations, the purpose of such obscure language could be reduced to the following formula: obscurity suggests complexity which suggests importance.
Obscurity suggests complexity which suggests importance: Don’t Drink the Water.
Last Sunday saw this year’s Superbowl, when the marketing agencies try to wow us into another enthusiastic year of American consumerism. I was in no mood for any of it; in fact, I was rather grumpy last weekend. So when I found Theodore Dalrymple’s intolerant text entitled Freedom and its Discontents in which he expresses thanks for not having to voice on radio his thoughts on the 12 year old Austrian boy who recently had a sex change, I was annoyed and grumpified even more, although I appreciated his perspective. He wrote:
If I had spoken my mind, without let or hindrance, I should have said what I suspect a very large majority of people think: that there is something grotesque, and even repugnant, about the whole idea of sex-changes, let alone of sex-changes for twelve year-olds.
I don’t find the issue repugnant nor do I find it very interesting. Dalrymple goes on to write about how the freedom of expression has been curtailed, not by onerous censorship laws, but by the intolerance of the politically correct. He concludes by writing: ‘Please don’t reply to any part of this article. I won’t read it: I know I’m right.’Those who know they are right are the most exasperating people one ever has to deal with. Stubborn minded fools so set in their ways they don’t even care about appearing to be ignorant, deluded and hateful. Dalrymple’s work nevertheless tends to be a good read because we can learn and gain something from his perspective. He isn’t constrained by an idealism, nor his he constrained by the specialized knowledge that cuts ‘those in the know’ off from the common.
Over my time doing this list, I’ve occasionally received letters taking to task something I wrote in introduction, or questioning my link selection. I thought I would need a defense of Dalyrmple’s article saying basically: don’t shoot the messenger, and began it anticipating this edition. But over the past week, I saw more than one article appear which basically underlines a theme of intolerance. It is one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing with Goodreads, and that is attempting to document through the link selection the occasional popular meme – an idea which seems to be expressed in more than one article appearing simultaneously from different sites.
The greatest example of intolerance in current public/web discussion has to do with the Holocaust, and seems focused on the latent assumption that the next war will be with Iran. There seems to be a lack of appetite in the United States for another invasion, which is a good thing, but churning along underneath the popular sentiment is the attempt by the right-wing blowhards to demonize Iran’s president Ahmadinejad who made the cover of yesterday’s (Feb 10) Globe & Mail. We have been told for months that Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier, because he has said in the past that it was a myth. Out of an extreme generosity and skepticism of North American propaganda, I’ve questioned whether he didn’t mean the anthropological sense of the word, until I remembered referring in recent conversations to consumerism as a myth (meaning it as an inaccurate oversimplification of our economic activity) and I was using the popular form of the word.
To clarify: anthropologically a myth is a story of meaning, one that punches above its weight of accumulated incidents. To say that the Holocaust is a myth under this context I think is accurate. It is has found a high, and defining, place in the Jewish story, and in a world of secularism, it seems that while not all contemporary Jews may believe in their God, they certainly all believe in their near genocide. As a gentile I find the overwhelming presence of the story sometimes noxious, as it has seemed to breed an unhealthy and unproductive paranoia that generates more hatred and anger than peace. And as a gentile I have to be very careful about what I say regarding this historical incident, since there is an element within Judaism who are ready to condemn any one who questions this reality in any way, who seem to think that all gentiles are closeted anti-Semites ready to light up the ovens again if given the chance. The taboo and reverence that is now tied to the Holocaust story is surely mythic in this regard, making condemnable heretics of those who deny.
But popularly, a myth is a fairy-tale, a fiction, and I don’t question the veracity, or the horror of the Shoah. The reality of Holocaust denial fits in perfectly with the stupidity of the age which questions even the Moon landings; such is a healthy skepticism toward the stories of authority taken to an extreme and absurd level. We live at a time when some believe in the literalness of the Bible, that people lived with dinosaurs, and that perhaps Jesus only lived a thousand years ago. It is doubtful that Ahmadinejad is sophisticated enough to mean the anthropological sense of mythology when referring to those events.
But my problem is essentially based on the fact that I have no reason to believe anything I’m ever told by Western governments in general with regard to foreign policy. Since childhood I’ve been told that political leaders on the other side of the planet are generally untrustworthy and/or crazy. And because everything nowadays seems to be about the other side of the planet, I was left with cognitive dissonance when I heard Mike Wallace interview the President of Iran, as he did last August (and available in the two mp3s below). Because Mr. Ahmadinejad sounds saner than my own political leaders.
Wha? I mean, listen closely to the interviews: at one point Ahmadinejad says to Wallace (who prompted him to be more sound-bitey) that all of his questions require book length answers. What North American politician would say such a thing? ‘The problem that President Bush has is that in his mind he wants to solve everything with bombs. The time of The Bomb is in the past, it’s behind us. Today is the era of thoughts, dialogue, and cultural exchanges’. Who the fuck said that!?
Now, with props to my culture’s conditioning, who knows if he was just putting on a show of reasonableness for the Western cameras. We are told continually that these foreign leaders are like that: crafty propagandists who seduce our liberal left-wingers with their talk of international justice and wanting to do good things for their people. But we know The Truth, because our warmongering political elite have deemed to tell us The Real Story in between all of the secrets they keep. These leaders in the next hemisphere want to nuke us, they hate our freedom, they’re insane and hateful, unenlightened and ignorant, and they regularly flaunt international laws. They are also undemocratic and barbaric, because their elections are either rigged or the wrong people (Hamas) win. Further, when they execute their past tyrants they don’t do it tastefully.
Worst of all, they’re all anti-Semtic and want to destroy Israel, which is another way of saying they are Latter Day Nazis and thus we’re in another Just War against genocidal fascists. In the midst of this snake pit there is Israel, and the Israeli Cabinet, we need to remember, is along with the Pope and the American President, infallible; all graced by God with the ability to never be wrong about anything.
On Freedom of Expression
As I’ve said, I’m being extremely generous in assuming that Mr. Ahmadinejad could be more intelligent than he is portrayed. But such an example, based on an uncommon view, removes my argument from the realm of shared experience from which we should be debating ideas about free expression. The controversial issues of our time are discussed based on common understanding and misunderstandings, and it’s important that we debate within those limits, rather than resort to extreme examples which make everything hypothetical fast.
Abortion is the example that comes readily to mind – growing up in the 1980s and hearing about Henry Morgentaler in the news, and even once participating in a junior high school debate on the subject, the pro-choice contingent regularly argued for cases of rape, incest, and maternal health concerns as deserving abortions. I haven’t checked out the stats, but I’ll hazard a guess that over 90% of abortions performed in North America have nothing to do with those examples. Common knowledge – which may be ignorant and flawed granted – suggests that most abortions are a form of birth control. To hedge around that by arguing the extremes keeps the debate from really being held in the first place, and thus the camps can remain unconvinced by the other’s position.
American commentators see free speech as a sacrosanct right, and as a result have one of the most intolerant and ignorant cultures on the planet. But that is their self-described right. The United States gift to the world seems to have been the enlarge definition of rights to include the right to degrade, discredit and humiliate oneself to a state of unreserved indignity. Anna Nicole Smith had the good fortune to die this past week to provide me with her example. The idealists of the U.S. make it a point to defend the offensive and vulgar as a part of this right, and perhaps here I shouldn’t remind you that vulgar came from the Latin word for common, as I want to try and elevate the common to think of our common capacity for intelligence and compassion rather than our current and common psychopathologies. It is to this end that we need free expression defended: so that we are able to judge things for ourselves.
Our position in Canada is a more intolerant view on intolerance. We accept limits to free-speech which includes anti-hate speech laws. This is meant to prevent harm, and as I understand it, our Supreme Court allowed this by stating that some forms of speech are not worth defending.
A case in point is Holocaust denial: questioning the interpretation of the evidence is one thing, but what is the motivation behind it? The Jews have a right to mythologize (anthropologically) the story, and why should any of the rest of us care? When did the phrase ‘mind your own business’ fall out of favour? I think I know the answer to my rhetorical question, and it’s basically the one favored by Ahmadinejad and his fellow skeptics, one that prefers to dehumanize Jews with the word ‘Zionist’. I don’t think I need to get into it. I think the point raised by the Supreme Court’s decision is essentially it isn’t worth the debate, and that in fact it could be perceived as harmful to engage in it.
Somehow (and I think this has remained largely unexplained and unexplored) we can enjoy a freedom of expression without regularly crossing the line into hate speech. Seldom is anyone investigated or charged: you really have to make an effort to be that offensive. Or one has to be basically poking a bee’s nest: posting calls for Bush to be assassinated online, creating cartoons of Muhammed as a terrorist and the like. As free expression those examples are a waste of the freedom, since it contributes nothing to a discussion and is really only retrogressively ignorant.
How do we manage to use our freedom of expression productively when and if we do? I think it comes from our appreciation for those who offend in ways that increase our capacity for all of expression by showing us a new idea, a new way of life, and a new way of thinking. But we are wary and even intolerant of those who want to limit our expression, or limit our innate sense of progress toward a better world, through the expression of their retrogressive views. In other words: blowing away a stale old convention and offending conservatives by doing so rocks; bringing about the downfall of civilization with a medieval attitude and mindset does not. Somehow we understand what constitutes this through a language of behavior rooted in our common experience. This is what makes conservatives so defensive: they know when they’ve been beat by a new expression. It used to be rock n’ roll: now it’s their teenagers using abbreviation, emoticons, and chatting online with strangers.
While we are united by a common grammar of speech, so too we are united by a common grammar of behaviour. This has been in the past referred to as bourgeois values and considered worth rebelling against, and thus movements created a type of poetry of misbehavior which expanded our own vocabularies of affect. But within these values is a core set of ideas about how we should treat one another, a common value set which sees the benefit to the whole at the individual’s expense.
Consider littering. Off hand, I’m sure we all agree that littering isn’t really a good thing. We’ll define it as saying it’s the introduction of garbage into a public space meant to be shared by all. We’ll further define garbage as something unwanted by someone. Thus, our definition here of littering is the introduction, of something unwanted, into a public space.
But what if this unwelcome introduction of something unwanted is called art by the litterer? Then it’s an intervention. Then, that cigarette cellophane you just dropped on the sidewalk is a performance. According to the art-rules I should shut up now, because the recontextualization destroys it as litter and makes it a human expression that should be nurtured, encouraged, and supported by art council grants. But here I really want to link littering to graffiti and say that because some people consider it unwelcome it is also a form of littering, but it’s one that I personally support as a human attempt at the beautification of plain (plane?) architecture.
While we all understand why we shouldn’t litter as part of our common knowledge, we also understand the deal with most abortions and why hate-speech could be criminal. We don’t need freedom of expression – or whatever other freedoms we enjoy – to be defended by extreme examples, because all laws, all social agreements, all freedoms exist first as a social convention in common knowledge and it is from this basis that the state feels it has the authority to police them. The fragmentation of our society into specialized interest groups is perhaps where we began to disagree about what should be legal and what shouldn’t be. Our common knowledge – our vulgarity – has been reduced to extreme forms of behavior and reduced in intelligence to something less than our potential making us more undignified than some animals.
The challenge has always been to incorporate the deviant into the conventional: this pattern has always seemed to be about the dominant sanctioning another – minority’s – convention as harmless rather than a sudden revaluation of the dominant’s morals. The arguments raised by Christopher Hitchens in his defense of the ‘freedom of denial’ in essence is of allowing that process to continue: for the dominant to not become so self-satisified that they refuse to consider the other’s point of view. But it also seems that we have reached examples of extreme perspectives that the dominant decided long ago were not sanctionable. Holocaust denial is one, as is sex with kids and animals. The recent Sundance film festival featured a film in which a 12 year old girl was raped, and another was a documentary on bestiality. My thoughts are essentially: do we really need to have that discussion? Are we so intellectually and emotionally bankrupt that we have to resort to those expressions for stimulation? It turns out that no distributor wants to buy the Dakota Fanning movie Hounddog and all I can think is thank god.
Ultimately, this is all about the strangeness of language: how a set of sounds, strung together a certain way, can have such intense psychological and intellectual effects. Words uttered or read can make the heart leap or fall, can be emotionally devastating or immensely uplifting, and it’s all just a bunch of sounds or a bunch of shapes on a surface. Through this, one mind interacts with another and our sense of what’s going in our world – that intersection of imagination and environment – grows until we eventually are changed people: more sophisticated, more learned, more conversant. We have a bigger bag of tricks and fuller experience of life. The freedom of speech is also the freedom to be exposed to ideas that we don’t agree with, so that we aren’t held back from the mysteriously transformative power of hearing or reading words. But a case can be made that some of this has the potential to be retrogressive and counterproductive, making us more stupid. Inasmuch as the state tries to do this for us, they should have better things to do, but I think it is also true that they don’t need to control what we think about things because that’s already done by a televised culture of idiocy. – Timothy
Psychopaths
In today’s Globe and Mail, ‘Focus’ section, there’s an article called ‘The Psychopath in the Corner Office’ about everyday psychopathic people who rise to positions of power. Mostly because the way the business world is, their ruthlessness is rewarded. These types of articles on ‘everyday psychopaths’ pop up every year or so. This stat:
In Prof. Hare’s estimation, the average incidence of psychopathy in North America is 1% of the population. That would mean there are about 300,000 psychopaths in Canada – and close to 3000 reading this very newspaper today. Perhaps you know one. Or are one.
One percent of the population begins to suggest that this is a normal variety of mind, a way they once characterized autism in a previous article from about two or three years ago.
This article on autism began by suggesting that the autistic mind was a result of natural selection – part of the variety of human being. Which is a decent way of thinking about it. ‘Psychopathy,’ writes the article’s author, Alexandra Gill,’…is a personality disorder characterized by a deep lack of conscience, empathy and compassion’.
With my empathy toward psychopaths activated, I wrote this letter to the editor:
From: Timothy Comeau
To: Letters@globeandmail.com
Date: May 27, 2006 4:45 PM
Subject: re: psychopath articleI read the article on corporate (and other) psychopaths with interest but grew concerned as to the validity of intensive background checks to prevent psychopaths from reaching positions to wreak havoc. Wouldn’t extensive screening lead to making these people unemployable and thereby reducing them to a life of welfare and poverty, where they’d become embittered and even more dangerous? As psychopaths are characterized by a deep lack of empathy and compassion, they’d be victimized by our own lack of empathy and compassion toward them. As the article suggests, our society is too geared toward the appreciation of ruthlessness that it comes as no surprise that so many seem to be high up in the food chain, and perhaps are already occupying their proper social roles.
You once ran an article on autism in which it was suggested that the autistic mind is the result of natural selection – producing variety amongst us. A similar suggestion about the psychopathic mind would have been warranted. But it’s funny that we treat autistics so poorly compared to psychopaths, especially considering that the autistics of the past are probably responsible for so many of our great endeavors while the psychopaths have given us our worst.
Timothy Comeau
As I re-read that now, I see that I should have also added that the way we continue to treat the poor is evidence of our own psychopathic society.
Manliness I
There was another article in today’s paper that I appreciated, about home-grown initiation rites. Also found in the ‘Focus’ section, and titled, ‘Saying goodbye to childhood’, it was about a young chap (Scott) who turned 16 and had an unusual birthday party.
Scott’s parents had organized an unofficial rite of passage to initiate their son into manhood. They invited a group of male friends and relatives they respected to talk to their son about what it means to become a man.
Scott’s mother goes on to say that she wanted something more than the usual ways we ‘self-initiate’.
Those who have studied life transitions agree that rites of passage are important – even essential – for adolescents becoming adults. ‘It doesn’t matter what we call it […] if adults don’t respond, adolescents will initiate themselves, often [but] not always, in destructive ways’. Binge drinking, experimenting with drugs or having sex are some of the ways teens in our society self-initiate.
It’s funny that needs saying, as if written for pre-adolescents, ignoring that everyone else not in question has gone through being a teenager, and should be able to remember how important it was to get laid or drunk for the first time.
The fellow quoted above is Ron Grimes, who wrote a book called Deeply Into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage and goes on to say therein that ‘whatever the reason, the past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the construction of rites of passage’. For Scott, this group of men numbered about twelve: a couple of neighbors, the fathers of some of his friends, is gay uncle with his partner. ‘Few of them knew each other, yet they were asked to share some personal experiences and insights into what it means to be a man’.
‘I wanted him to come away with the idea that being a man is honouring all aspects of his person; the physical, the mental, the spiritual and the emotional,’ [Scott’s father] says.He adds that he didn’t really learn how to live his life as a man until he was about 40 years old and attended a men’s-only weekend workshop in Berkeley, Calif. ‘It was like an initiation. It helped me realize what I missed out on … In my family, there wasn’t much talk about being a man. There wasn’t much discussion about my life beyond school’.
As for what the men told Scott…
the men talked about the necessity of doing the right thing, as hard as that may be, staying true to yourself and not following the crowd, finding something important outside of yourself and contributing to it. And when it comes to sex, being in a committed relationship is better than casual sex.
As Scott’s Mom says, she couldn’t pay someone to say such things. She saw that the following day he had a spring in his step and a pride in himself.
According to [Scott’s mom] society as a whole suffers from young adults being, as she calls it ‘uninitiated’. ‘Lots of teens don’t want to become men or women. We all known of 50 year old ‘boys’ who never said goodbye to their childhood because they weren’t shepherded,’ she says.A new books suggests that she might be on to something. In researching The Boomerang Age: Transitions to Adulthood in Families Simon Fraser University sociologist Barbara Mitchell interviewed 2000 adults from 19 to 35 years old in the greater Vancouver area who had either left home and come back, or never left at all. The majority said their were in their parent’s homes for economic reasons, but about 25% of them (mainly young men) said they were still at home because they weren’t psychologically or emotionally ready to leave.
A lot of the so-called artists I know/knew don’t want to be men or women either.
Manliness II
There appears to be something in the air though, since I’ve noticed attitudes toward manliness are up for discussion. The rise of ‘metrosexuality’ a couple of years ago caused a lot of talk and about 15 years ago there was a lot of talk too about these types of men-only circles (like what Scott’s dad must have gone too) where’d they go out to the woods and howl.
As a young man, trying to find my way without the benefit of young Scott’s experience, and dissatisfied with the initiations I did go through of the usual binge drinking and virginity-loss, I find that I’m also both intrigued and bothered by how the popular ideas about being a man are simply degrading. Why is it, for example, that fast food restaurants try to sell hamburgers by appealing to a fucked-up sense of manliness?
There used to be Harvey’s commercials that did this, and currently there’s a Burger King commercial I’ve seen, with a bunch of men walking tall and proud because they got their meat sandwich. Further, there are those Bud Light commercials advertising a coupon for steaks. WTF?
Recently, a book was published by Harvey Mansfield called Manliness (and this is what comes up when you Google that term as the first result, in addition to its reviews). All the reviews point out Mansfield’s harping against feminists and how, as Mark Kingwell said in his Globe and Mail review some time ago (March 18th, from which I paraphrase), ‘how it manages to offend all sorts of people at once’.
It’s almost to begin to imply that being a man today, or claiming to be one, is to be offensive. Which brings up Aristotle, who’s merely offensive because he’s a Greek Philosopher. That is, Artistotle is a dead white male, a pejorative phrase which Wikipedia tells us:
is a rhetorical device used to deride the emphasis on Western civilization in schools […]. The term was used pejoratively in the early 1990s by those advocating multicultural studies. The term finds widespread usage among members of the educational establishment who see students as agents of social change.
Why is that, to expand our minds and our study to something beyond our immediate context (such as Western Civilization and its heritage) we have to first insult it, or imply that it is offensive?
Nevertheless, it was in Kingwell’s review that I was alerted to Artistotle’s list of manly attributes, found in his Niomachean Ethics.
Ethics are the application of morality, and morality we should consider not as something religious or superstitious but as simply the collection of ideas we have about living a good life. For some, enjoying a cup of tea before bed time is part of a good life, and thus is a moral action, and it thus follows that not buying tea is unethical. For many, enjoying a pint on a patio with friends is a part of a good life, and therefore it would be unethical to shut down all the bars or to quit drinking. Because I’m deeply interested in the variety of moral worlds that you find once you get past the idea that morality has something to do with Jesus (in that sense, it merely represents The Bible’s idea about what a good life is because it’s God’s idea about how we should live our lives), I’m interested in how Artistotle formulated his ideas about what a good Greek life was for a man 2300 years ago.
By Googling for it, I did come across this article earlier this week, written by an apparently young fellow in the States named Jason Roberts who’s dividing time between college and the military according to the posted profile. One almost suspects by this fellow’s way of writing and infatuation with the Classical past (in addition to a seemingly thinly-veiled misogyny) that he hasn’t yet been initiated the traditional way into manliness through sex.
However, he presents Aristotle’s thoughts on being a man through a blockquote from The Niomachean Ethics which we can break down like this –
A man, according to Aristotle, is one who is:
confident in the face of danger
moderate in his use and enjoyment of opulent things
magnanimous in estimation of his own worth
ambitious in his desire of honor
patient in response and dealings with his passions
truthful in his life and dealings with others
righteously indignant when done wrong
and just towards himself and others.
He paints a beautiful portrait of this person, saying that this man:
“????does not take petty risks
nor does he court danger
because there are few things that he values highly
but he takes great risks
and when he faces danger he is unsparing of his life
because to him there are some circumstances in which it is not worth living
he is bound to????speak and act straightforwardly????and
he cannot bear to live in dependence upon somebody else
he does not nurse resentment
In troubles that are unavoidable or of minor importance he is the last person to complain or ask for help
his gait is measured, his voice deep, his speech unhurried.????
Mr. Roberts then writes (interspersed with my italicized comments delimitated by ‘//’):
But today, every single element of manliness that Aristotle described is under attack. The 1960’s ushered in the era of the Feminists. Unlike intellectual trends, feminism became a cultural trend. But not only was their view of womanliness skewed, their view of manliness was also dangerously wrong. Sadly, this view has come to dominate our culture, beit in the form of the metrosexual, the effeminate man, or the man in touch with his feminine side.
// I consider myself to have a healthy dose of metrosexuality, so that I at least have a fashion sense, unlike the fellows you see in the fast-food stereotypes.
Instead of a man who is courageous and confident in facing reality, men are now told that it is okay to be soft and cowardly.
// Agree
Instead of a man who is moderate, men are now told to indulge themselves in the luxuries of life; to spend huge sums on fashionable clothes, stylish haircuts, and manicures.
// I also agree this isn’t admirable
Instead of a man who is magnanimous, men are now told to be pusillanimous; to apologize for their greatness and expound upon their defects.
// ‘pusillanimous’ is defined as: ‘lacking courage and resolution : marked by contemptible timidity’. Is a contraction of this word from whence we get ‘pussy’? In other words, men are now told to be pussies, to apologize for their greatness (in whatever way they are great I suppose – great handymen, with the barbecue, as lovers? – ) and expound on their defects: geesh is that ever true. We trade stories of misery just not seem better than other people.
Instead of a man who is ambitious in his desire of honor, men are now told to seek the lowly and to be meek. Instead of a man who is patient in response to his passions, men are now told to cry uncontrollably, to let their emotions pour out. Instead of a man who is truthful, men are now told that white lies are okay, and that it is better to flatter than to “offend”. Instead of a man who is righteously indignant, men are now told to turn the other cheek; to forgive and forget; to be compassionate to our worst enemies.
// I agree with all of this up until the dig at compassion. Showing compassion to one’s enemies is something only a strong person can do. We see it even in the way Alexander the Great treated his defeated enemies. Showing compassion makes us better than psychopaths.
And instead of a man who is just, men are now told to trade favors, to barter for social acceptance, to achieve by means of social connections, to be tolerant of all opinions, and to love thy neighbor as thyself.
// ‘to love thy neighbor …’ means that true Christians are pussies and have been since the fall of the Roman Empire? This dig begins to get at Nietzche’s ideas about a Master and a Slave Morality, the later of course being the ‘good life ideas’ of the Christians.
This interests me because of my developing ideas about being a man in this society where feminism has been wonderfully successful, and as I grow away from the way I felt about patriarchy at age 25.
My visceral loathing for Bush II began with that disgust for patriarchy, but I should develop this to say that patriarchy is and was repulsive to me because of it’s lunk-headed stupidity, especially in the face of oppression and environmental destruction. It is further exemplified by the way the media uses fat and stupid men in sitcoms to be ‘everyman’ who find a sense of manliness through the eating of meat. Overweight, unhealthy men who obsess over a food which should be a rarity, (not a staple) represent ‘everyman’? I don’t think so. There is also an unfornuate characteristic of patriarchy that glorifies in combat and competition, which is why I could tell during the debates Bush had with Al Gore in 2000 that he’d get the country into a war somehow, since he was such a patriarchial figure-head.
Why are sophisticated wine-snobs never represented on sitcoms or commercials without also being pusillanimous at the same time? Think of Frasier on the eponymous sitcom and his brother Myles. Think of how Myles is also the name of the character in the 2004 film Sideways, the sophisticated writer and wine-snob who is also timid and emotionally devastated by his divorce, while his friend Jack is the lunk-headed fun-loving (probably meat-eating) fellow out to get laid before his wedding day, behaving in a way that is unethical in more than one moral context.
The stupid men stereotypes are the ones prone to be defended by women who should know better (as the sitcom men where once for me) as ‘representing everyman’. Is this because it conforms most readily to their anti-masculine ideology?
This ideology permeates the art world. Take this press-release from last September for example, with my emphasis:
Celebratory Angst: Riggin’ the Exhaust
Steven LaurieUniversity of Western Ontario MFA Thesis Exhibition
Location: ArtLab (UWO Campus/ Visual Arts Building)
Dates of Exhibition: September 16 – 30
Opening Reception: Friday, September 16, 5-7 pm
Description of Exhibition:
Through the use of the suburban backyard/garage as a platform, I am interested in the ideas, images, and behaviors that are culturally recognized as ‘normative’ masculine qualities, and how they influence gender performance. This body of work makes use of the contradictions found within gender-based constructs while attempting to critically address the relationship between labor and leisure and the performances of the everyday.
My current studio practice involves the modification and tuning of gas powered machines that meld the impetuous activities of burning rubber and revving with the aspects of utility and desire. Through isolating and amplifying particular actions, stereotypes and clich???s usually assigned to a masculine proviso, I develop hyper-masculine tools that emphasize the relationship between the male body, extension/attachment and exhibitionism. By using steel, readily available machine parts and exhaust tips I am exploring the intricate ideas of masculinity through the critical perspectives of anxiety and celebration.
My objections to this are that I don’t think gender is any more a performance than sex – that is, the ‘performance’ is very much preprogrammed. We thrust our hips therein instinctively, not because we took fucking lessons. The so called ‘normative’ of male behavior is also very much instinctive, but includes the behaviour of intelligent and sophisticated men, not just the fools, of that common majority that creates the ‘normative’ idea in the first place.
So, Mr. Artist is interested in it, and that means what? – he does a bunch of stuff mocking the subject matter. Imagine if anthropologists, instead of writing descriptive papers and documenting and archiving the culture, enacted performances that mocked their subjects. ‘I’m a native tribesman, I fuck 12 year old girls, I slaughter wild pigs with my bare hands and I believe in forest spirits’. The girl who hates men does a dance, her face skewed into a ugly pose, as she tried to bring out the primitive brutality of her tribal fellow. The audience sips beer and laughs. Afterward they congratulate her. The art world becomes a bunch of self-satisfied assholes who want to mock and encourage divisiveness.
Through my art-world dealings, I find myself on the defensive at times about being a straight (white) man, and why? I see men degraded all around me today and find that as offensive as what women experienced in the 1950s. What does it mean to be a man today, and why should we put up with feminist degradation? I think this is both a fair question and a fair critique of the environment encouraged by feminists, many of whom would prefer to view gender as a performance rather than something deeply genetic. But this is not to say that type of testosterone shock-jock (who are the male gender’s bimbos who degrade us all) is something acceptable either, but is something uncivilized and barbaric.
This type of research into what could be called conservative patriarchal bullshit is thus leading me to want to read Aristotle’s Niomachean Ethics which as I’ve already said, is part of the larger project of understanding different moral/ethical orders as differing visions of the good life.
Which brings me to Brad Pitt; perhaps he best exemplifies our culture’s considerations of manliness. He certainly leads a good life, at least according to what this culture values. He dated Gwyneth Paltrow when she was marketed as the perfect woman, then he married a TV star when she was considered the perfect woman, and now he’s having a baby with a woman considered to be the sexiest woman alive or some such thing. Beyond his famous good looks he’s wealthy and said to be smart, with an interest in architecture (friends with Frank Gehry no less). And, he’s a vegetarian. When you need a manly man for a movie (which function to advertise a variety of moral visions), who does’t eat ‘mheeet’ Pitt’s your man.
He’s Achilles in 2004’s Troy but he is also Tyler Durden in 1999’s Fight Club, which is perhaps our fucked up culture’s version of the Niomachean Ethics. Fight Club‘s a morality tale that had resonance with me, presenting a vision of a good life based on an anti-consumerist ethic and mocking corporate psychopathy. It is also one that begins to question our society’s ideas about manliness. As in for example, this line
Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is it essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No.
Or, this:
Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see us squandering it. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
Toronto isn’t the best place to live right now. With the two centerpieces of this city’s culture currently undergoing renovations, and with the Power Plant gallery continuing to highlight just how irrelevant and uninteresting most contemporary art is, I find myself bored more often that I’d like to be. But the talk is of a cultural renaissance and the city is looking for some kind of vision for itself. One problem: this is the corporate centre of Canada, and corporations are lousy at vision. Look at advertising – it has become the dominant cultural and visual expression of our society. Pompeii was frozen in time and its frescoes were preserved. Such a disaster in Toronto would only preserve a galaxy of images of vacant expressions and languid poses.And the graffiti. God bless the graffiti. A recent book suggests the ancient cave painting of Europe had more in common to graffiti than they do to religious iconography, which personally makes sense. (However, since we fundamentally know nothing about the cave paintings, they will always be susceptible to fashionable interpretation: a century ago when religion was taken more seriously, they had religious meaning. Now that religion has faded in importance, they’re graffiti. A century from now, a new reading perhaps based on whatever reality is present at that time).
Christopher Hutsul, in today’s Toronto Star, interviewed some people about Toronto’s cultural vision. He spoke to Fiona Smyth, Matthew Teitelbaum (of the AGO) and Sarah Diamond (the new president of OCAD). Why Smyth was chosen to be the voice of Toronto’s artists, I don’t know. I guess he could have picked worse … there are plenty worse. Smyth hasn’t been relevant to the Toronto scene for a decade (at least that’s my understanding). When asked about her vision, Hutsul wrote:
“For painter Fiona Smyth, graffiti should be flat-out decriminalized. ‘Billboards are taking over,’ she says. ‘Every available space is being grabbed by corporations, and graffiti can be a counterpoint to that …. ‘ The art form could extend to our rooftops, which Smyth believes are an untapped resource for gallery space. She imagines a city where rooftops are connected by a network of catwalks and feature sculptures, art pieces and gardens.”
I have some idea of what she’s smoking, but I’d like to point out that artists really need to get off the anti-billboard bandwagon. Only because, we get it. Imagine you want to suggest a new strategy, argue a point, or hell, even get laid. There’s a progression that occurs in proposition, argument and in seduction. You do not belabor the first step. You move forward. Yes billboards suck. Next…..
There’s a self-consciousness at the moment in the Left of what has gone wrong … and this failure to evolve the message is surely one of the problems. Our city is over-corporatized, billboards are part of that, but graffiti is not an antidote to them. Graffiti can be as much of an eyesore … one person’s masterpiece is another’s whack job, and so we need to keep this in mind. I for one like how graffiti throws down some colour on the otherwise gray landscape, shows some imagination.
We shouldn’t even try to understand architects who think raw concrete is lovely, let’s not waste the energy. But let’s think of how there are paint factories in the world capable of producing enough paint to cover the CN Tower if we so chose.
The tower for one is nice enough as it is, but we’re also used to it that way. We are also used to thinking that ancient Greco-Roman architecture was purely white. But it wasn’t – the Greeks and Romans painted their buildings – they seemed to enjoy colour. They seemed to have suffered from the fear of empty spaces known as horror vacui. Yet, in our day and age, the pure white walled room is the temple of contemporary art and culture. The overall message is that colour is bad, somehow not pure, because of the puritan pollution of neo-classicism which still lingers in the mind of the cultural. Rooftops of gardens and sculptures is something they might have done 2000 years ago, but I don’t really think sculpture has much relevance and I further imagine the sculpture would be like the shit atop the poles on Spadina … pure eyesores.
Calling for catwalks and sculpture gardens is just asking for more space to put up advertising kiosks like Derek Sulivan did. Was his project a critique of capitalism, or the suggestion that billboards are ok, as long as they imitate what was done in Europe a century ago?
Teitelbaum suggests expanding the AGO’s exhibitions to outside the space … put stuff up at Union Stn and similar. I suppose he hasn’t walked through BCE place at any time in the past few years, or through that office building on Yonge that had a space Paul Petro used to run. The BCE exhibitions are usually interesting, but ignored by the business people going to and fro. Union Stn wouldn’t work either – the space is too shitty (the Go Train space that is) and that would be your primary audience. People arriving on VIA would be too distracted by their trip to check out art, and no one from downstairs waiting for a Go Train would go upstairs, probably because the show would have stupid hours or be otherwise inaccessible.
The waterfront idea has some merit, but they’d be encroaching on the Power Plant’s territory, and then there’d be a turf war. Power Plant people bitching about the AGO, I can see it now, and it depresses me. But let’s move on to Sarah Diamond, who, it appears, is full of the vigour of naivte. ‘Look at me, I’m the president of an art school! Let’s have a Happening’. Jesus H Christ.
Yes, to reinvigorate our city’s cultural life, let’s go back 40 years, to a time when Henry Moore fell in love with Toronto out of spite. Happenings with scientists. I imagine Power Point presentations on quantum mechanics and relativity theory and oooh, dark matter. A real happening now involves nudity, cocaine, endless kegs, and music that hurts your ears. That’s not something likely to be sanctioned by corporate Canada and its funders.
Diamond goes on to say that arts need to be at the centre and not at the periphery – but they are at the periphery just as much as plumbing is to many of us – because the arts have become a little industry. I mean, if I needed a plumber, I wouldn’t know where to start to find one. It’s hard enough trying to find somebody to fix your computer, let alone your pipes. The arts are the same way. I happen to know lots of artists because I am an artist as well, because that’s my scene. I don’t know any plumbers or computer fix-it people. For Diamond to suggest moving the arts to the centre is the same as the president of plumbing college saying people need to pay more attention to their pipes. Ain’t going to happen darling.
Nor should we have a crowd of artists at Pearson to welcome passengers. Lame lame lame …. I’m not that surprised she got hired on with these splendid ideas. OCAD doesn’t cease to underwelm me (although I was impressed they’d moved their library catalogue to a self-designed Linux system the last time I was there). Artists at Pearson would send a strangely parochial message, suggesting we’re so desperate for other people’s attention that we’re going to do a song and dance and paint them pretty pictures as soon as they get off the plane.
As opposed to a place like New York. You know what New York’s philosophy is don’t you? It’s Fuck You. That’s why people want to go there. Because their amazing, they know it, and because this gives them the self-confidence to be brash and rude and bold. So they can afford to say Fuck You. Toronto: please come see our hobbits on stage! Look at our shiny artists, aren’t we special? When Toronto has the balls to kiss off the rest of the world as we do the rest of Canada (not for nothing we’re so despised) then the world will take notice, find us interesting, and you won’t need artists at the airports. A healthy culture is not a self-conscious culture. Nor is a healthy culture one that looks to Yorkville celebrities as a source of identity, as happens every September.
The article ends with two poets. “Molly Peacock, poetry editor at the Literary Review of Canada, suggests we stamp poetry into every new sidewalk square. Peacock, who helped bring ‘Poetry in Motion’ to the New York transit system, says if this were to happen, we’d be ‘the most marvellously literary city in the world.'”
This would probably make me hate poetry. I like it on the subway, but on sidewalks like this I’d find it oppressive, overwhelming, and a gross validation of text over speech, which isn’t a balance we should be persuaded to topple. If we get all offended by the stupid adverts everywhere, wouldn’t text everywhere underfoot be a similar violation of public space?
The second poet highlights the idea that poets are useless twits who merely have a way with words. “Sonnet L’Abbé believes the key to a more artful city is for people to ‘ease up on the gas’ in the pursuit of economic prosperity and make a ‘personal commitment to loving art. And when I say loving, I mean paying attention to it, getting to know, not just throwing money at it. It’s like a person growing their own artistic flower … If you have enough flowers, then the whole city becomes a garden of people who love and consume and make art.'”
We shouldn’t be asking people who failed chemistry in highschool to suddenly become chemists. ‘Get to know chemistry …’ they’d say, ‘fall in love with the test tube’. Ridiculous. You can’t ask this of people.
But you can try to create an environment where culture is an ambient reality, so that whenever the interests is sparked, they’ll know how to follow it. Recently I’ve been reading the plays of Aristophanes. A couple of weeks ago, on my way to meet a friend and with time to spare, I dropped into the ROM to check out the Greek artifacts and to familiarize myself with the world of those stories. This is what living in the city means to me – the availability of material for the pursuit of my interests. Libraries, galleries, museums … these are there so that we can grow as individuals, so that we can learn something about the world and what it means to be human.
Gardens and sculptures are lame because they are window dressing, imitations of a style that meant something thousands of years ago, when the statues were of gods or heroes. Exhibitions in transit areas are stupid because those are spaces designed to be moved through… and artists at air ports are foolish because only cultures who are trying to impress the bigger more powerful ones are prone to do something like that.
Toronto is not New York because we don’t have the cultural wealth. Build up the wealth by supporting the artists who work here, and by collecting masterpieces from around the world (and not just from the Anglo-American Empire), and then the city could facilitate cultural individuals. As it is, the city’s best libraries are the university ones, which are limited to the public, and the institutions are more interested in their face lifts.
Canada is a great country and I’m of the opinion that a whole generation of artists and the like are currently working in the city, a generation that will be read about in tomorrow’s history books. Forget Andy Warhol, and Happenings, and all that shit New York did in the 1960s. Toronto’s 1960s moment is right now, and let’s pay attention to those artists if you want to feel like you’re living in a culturally vibrant, exciting, and relevant place.
In his book on Northrop Frye1, Jonathan Hart describes Roland Barthes as attacking the myths of ‘the bourgeoisie’ and stating that for Barthes, the problem with what is often translated as ‘middle class’ was its inability to imagine the other. Thus, I go through artschool being informed and taught these Marxist ideas, and for a time immediately after graduating am prone to denounce middle-class values as bourgeois.
Then I read Steven Pinker’s account of the middle class (in The Blank Slate, p.416, in his chapter on art), which I had to agree with:
As for sneering at the boureoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class – personal responsilbilty, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy – are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members of good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the 20th Century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it’s none of our damn business.
The problem of imagining the other is still with us, but like everything has been updated to a new century’s context. ( I’m inclined to say it’s generational in one regard – my parents certainly have this problem, but my parents are also political and social conservatives).
The problem of imagining the other was clear to me in the article I read yesterday by Anthony Harrigan, called ‘History, the Past, and Inner Life’ (PDF) which seemed interesting at first but then became intolerable. He seems to argue that while in the past there has been a connection between a technically advanced society and barbaric behavior (the Nazis) he seems to imply that one cause the other, which is nonsense. He says this of the culture of the United States:
One has only to look at the ‘entertainment’ industry media in the United States. The technology of the electronic media is unparalleled in the world, but much of the comment is hostile to the values of our inherited civilization. The tide of pornography is rising, flooding the internet, exposing the average user to the most vile images.
Which was the first thing to make me suspicious. Then he goes on to write:
Dr. McClay has pointed out that an increasing number of academic historians strive to ‘demonstrate that all our inherited institutions, beliefs, conventions, and normative values are arbitrary ???social construction in the service of power???and therefore without legitimacy or authority.’
An argument to which I’m sympathetic, since I don’t have such a negative view of humanity to see them as all power greedy, preferring the Buddhist view that all beings desire happiness. His point though is raised in order to say the following:
We see this process at work in the effort to de-legitimize the institution of marriage established as a religiously ordained estate between a man and a woman. Judicial validation of ‘civil unions’ between homosexuals undermines the most fundamental institution of our society, monogamous marriage. It opens the door to polygamy and every sort of perverted sexual activity, including bestiality.
Which is of course bullshit, and our first clear example of this fellow being unable to imagine the other. And yet, when reading this yesterday, Marxist terms filtered through French semiology did not pop into my mind; instead I had the realization that I was reading the right-wing point of view.
One reads on, to find this gem of intolerance (the emphasis within is mine):
In this era in which leftist social doctrines prevail, it isn???t surprising that great emphasis is placed on multiculturalism in schools and colleges. The aim in promoting multiculturalism is to downgrade or disavow the culture of our nation and civilization. In many educational institutions, for instance, students are launched into the culture of India before they study the culture of the United States and the Western world. This is a deliberate process designed to underscore the point that our American and Western history and values do not have primacy. Multiculturalism leaves those exposed to it morally disoriented and rootless. Students are supposed to learn that there is nothing special about our traditions; no one is to regard them as having authority in life. A mishmash of culture is ladled out so that young people are without authoritative guidance in adopting values. Those who want to downgrade our traditions and values have what the writer Joan Didion has referred to as ???preferred narratives.??? These narratives have as their central theme that the United States has an oppressive society and has been that way from the start. They regard the Constitution of the United States as a conspiracy against the powerless. They choose to depict minorities as victims regardless of the particular circumstances.
Here I see the power of freedom of speech and thought, to be able to read something I find offensive but which gives me a privileged glismpe into answering the question we express nowadays with ‘WTF?’
What the fuck they are thinking is that multiculturalism is to degrade one’s own culture? How about the idea that we take our congenital cultures for granted – that we don’t need to appreciate them since we are living within it, and see The Other as offering us different perspectives. One thing that Mr. Harrigan does throughout is to talk of ‘our culture, and our civilization’, dividing the world into haves and have nots, closing the door to ‘guests’ in a sense. One detects a distinctive lack of welcome in his use of words.
How does one claim a culture with such certainty? And I think it needs to be asked, why should anyone be so proud of the parochial, patriarchal American culture, so sure of itself, that it doesn’t require the perspectives of other experiences? As Kurt Vonnegut brought up in his recent appearance on The Daily Show in a sarcastic defense of the situation in Iraq, a new democracy takes 100 years to free its slaves, and 150 years to give women the vote, and that at the beginning of democracy, quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite ok.
Why is it about the Right that seems to require this sense of certainty? The argument here seems to be that Mr. Harrigan is so weak-minded that being exposed to the Kama Sutra will cause him to indulge in hedonistic pleasures of which he never dreamed, instead of simply saying, ‘that’s not for me’? You encounter this weak-mindedness with their talk on God and morality – that without God existing, there’d be no reason for moral rules, and than what do you do? How about continue to treat others well because, as it’s been said by many a previous Christian, ‘a good deed is its own reward’?
My ultimate point here though is to say that talk of ‘the bourgeoisie’ is outdated, and that to be able to make the same points being made 50 years ago by the likes of Roland Barthes, one talks of ‘the right wing’ or ‘conservatives’. Which is a little unfortunate – a conservative streak in society that builds museums, ‘to conserve’ is welcome and necessary, but one that fails to imagine other cultures and appreciate their differences and the perspectives those differences offer is simply toxic.
The Crisis
Premise – 1. No one gives a shit about anything anymore. Is this true? What do people actually seem to care about?
Answer – When I say ‘people’ who do I mean? Have the generations become so stratified that one really should say:
a ‘what do old people care about’,
b ‘what do the middle aged care about?’
c ‘what do young people care about?’
d ‘what do teenagers care about?’
e ‘what do children care about?’
f ‘what do todlers care about?’
Notice how this is exactly the language of marketing research. And if you pay attention to trends, watch advertisements between the dramas and the laughs, and catch the pronouncements of the Marketeers when they make it into the news, you can answer each one.
a. What do old people care about?
Supposedly, old people care about health care. Access to medicine. The government is supposed to subsidize pills and make them easy to get a hold of. Old people are also supposed to be concerned with their retirement, and having their pensions and being able to enjoy their last years. They also supposedly have trouble getting in and out of the bathtub.
b. What do the middle aged care about?
Supposedly they care about sexual disfunction, and other medical conditions requiring the latest and greatest pill. New cars, home care, this generation seems to be the target of Canadian Tire ads for lawnmowers and power washers.
c. what do young people care about?
Supposedly, people within my age range care about bein’ kul. Too happenin to pay attention for very long, everything is zip wham flash – snappy headlines, snappy stories, George Stroumboulopoulos giving it to us straight by cutting out the fat. Dose!
Dude, I got to like get my concert tickets and shit, and I don’t watch TV because it’s stupid, and I can’t afford cable, and I don’t buy the paper cuz who cares? So how the fuck do you know what’s going on in the world?
I don’t cuz like, who cares?
-or-
I check out Reuters on the internet, drudgereport, watch The Daily Show …. So basically, the internet and The Daily Show is where you get your news?
Yeah.
-or-
I read the free weeklies
c. What do teenagers care about?
Apparently, teenagers have always been susceptible to vanity, self-esteem issues, and a desire to get laid. Apparently, adults have always thought this was terrible. The biological irony is that when they were teenagers, the same adults went through the same thing, only they grew up, learned why this was terrible etc – or at least that’s the old model.
Under the old model, the awfulness repeats itself and the parents are too inept at communication and memory that they give the kids a hard time, packing a suitcase full of issues for them to take into their young adulthood, and sabotaging their chances of having anything close to a fulfilling and sane relationship until they’re well into their 30s or 40s, if ever. Under the old model, the good parents can guide their kids through the process, so that they emerge mentally healthy at the end of it.
But under the New Model there are mother and daughter teams who prance around like they’re both 16. This creates the danger that the children think silly vanity is ok. I, however, imagine this scenario for that future: the horror of their botoxed parents shocks them into the awareness that unaging freakiness isn’t natural and that maybe nature’s got a good thing going with the whole ‘old folk dying to make way for the new’ thing. Eventually, the children of such people will realize this on their own and be embarrassed by the behavior of their parents who refused to grow up. (I’ve always found it more than a little weird how some people glorify immaturity since, by definition, maturity is when you’re at your prime, so why want to remain less than that? It’s like, everyone’s choosing to be ‘medium’ rather than ‘well done’. Perhaps it’s no accident that mediocre is so popular, the law of the distribution of averages withstanding).
d. What do children care about?
Apparently they can be reliably counted on to be fascinated with dinosaurs, and they like to play. Cartoons, and toys, and fanciful stories; sugar and spice and everything naughty and nice, this is what little people are made of. Especially sugar – candy fiends. Today, they are also inclined to care about weight loss.
e. What do toddlers care about?
I don’t know, learning to walk? Child development psychology is filling in those gaps for us, since no grown up alive seems able to remember their first few years outside of the womb. Probably because before we learned to speak, we had no way to organize our memories. I remember learning to spell my name one afternoon with a magic marker and a sheaf of paper, but I was past my toddler years by then.
So back to the problem – no one give a shit about anything. True or False?
T.
Because ‘no one’ doesn’t exist. Society no longer seems unified by anything except by the new language of demographics. Cultural identity is important, and people define themselves by their jobs. When you meet someone, you ask them what they do, looking to fill in the picture, looking for insight into what type of person they are. We all learn the dangers of stereotyping and prejudice, but all seem to have a feeling that a stockbroker is a different chap than a lawyer, and that the office copy girl’s life might be a bit more boring than a girl who introduces herself with the words, ‘I’m an actress’.
Interest groups, interest groups, interest groups everywhere!
So, a new question: is this a problem?
The Old School would answer that of course this is a problem. Everything is built out of the metanarratives – remember those? History, mythology, Jesus, Vitamin C …. there are problems in the world, we are citizens of a Western society, and further, citizens of a demographic nation! We have freedom of speech!
And the freedom to not give a shit.
I’m left thinking that the feeling of crisis that hangs in the air is only one under the Old Models. Under the new models, since no one cares, it’s nothing. People aren’t even paying attention. What’s the worst that could happen people ask? And what are the answers? No one can even come up with those, since everything seems to keep functioning.
Transit strike!
What transit strike, they came up with a last minute offer.
Election!
What election?
Do I really have to vote again?
Whatever, what does the government do?
As the Conservatives and the NDP keep reminding us – the Liberals haven’t done shit for 12 years and people with jobs still got their jobs, and people on welfare are still seen as poor suckers, and everywhere, Federal inaction has begun to give the impression that Ottawa isn’t necessary. They’re behind-the-scenes fellows … as long as the show keeps going on, no one thinks the stagehands are important, because razzle dazzle and …. wait, did I just see a celebrity in Yorkville? But that’s an old argument. Helicopters keep falling out of the sky because of Liberal inaction. And the broken promises, from getting rid of the GST on, it’s been Red Book dreams at election time, and the nightmare of policy review come afternoon.
Christ. I can’t help but say that the feeling of doom that I see hovering above the grave of John Paul II and the rest of the 20th Century’s cast of characters, is one exacerbated by my own dismal finances, and the irresponsibility of not even opening the bills that came in the mail because I didn’t have the money to pay them when they arrived. But now it’s all caught up with me and I’m dealing with it. I’ll get through it again; I’ll get through it for this week. I can say that a certain lack of courage of facing the problem then, because it seemed unsolvable, was out of a feeling that it’ll be solvable in the future, and in a sense that’s how it’s turned out, only the future came a little quicker than I expected. Anyway, I want to say that my behavior in this way mirrors that of the politicians and the leaders of our society. Focused on keeping the spinning machine from whirling out of control on a week by week basis – or, a quarter by quarter basis – they put off and juggle deadlines and ongoing problems. But eventually the chickens come home to roost. The Liberals are fucked because of everything John Ralston Saul warned us about ten years ago in The Unconscious Civilization. It’s all caught up to them.
The Prime Minister wanted to talk to the nation directly, because he doesn’t trust the filter of the media, and he thinks that he couldn’t do it through Parliament. Have you watched Parliament lately? There’s a call to order every few minutes. I don’t blame P.M. P.M. at all. I think it’s one of the few things he’s done that shows decisiveness. The fact that the media are all like, ‘it’s not a national crisis, what’s he thinking’ – all I can say is shame on them. The motherfuckers. They were spinning it as if the shows he was going to interrupt were a million time more important than mere politics.
Now, it’s easy to see the broadcasters as simply in the pockets of advertisers etc … of course they are … but I think what’s I found most bothersome was the visceral reaction – as if the fucking O.C. was suddenly sacred. The Globe and Mail – a print source, who is supposed to be competing with broadcasting! – took this line, printing a picture from the O.C. between politicians. Benedict the 16th – you interrupt the soap operas to show him waving to the crowd for the first time, sure – but our Prime Minister going head to head with Friends re-runs? Who does he think he is? The Pope?
Ok. Fine. I guess I have to accept that fact that whatever comes out of a Hollywood studio is in someways connected with the stringed beads and red threads of religion. Just have to face reality there. But I’m really embarrassed by a media so lacking in insight and imagination to equate speaking with your countrymen has only something you do in emergency. When actions speak louder than words, his action rose above the heckles of the Parliament and drowned out the talking heads and the Avid editors who’d have soundbited anything he’d said in Parliament to determinant of the message.
It almost makes me want to vote for the Liberals, if only Jack Layton wasn’t so damn sane and sensible. Honestly, why isn’t this guy running rings around the others? Oh, wait, I forget, because he doesn’t appeal to ‘the people’ as there are no people. Only demographics. I suppose I remain the overeducated, compassionate, bitchy demographic, which isn’t kul, and therefore, who cares what I think.
Last year I had the pleasure of reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate which argues against ideology and for the recognition of an innate and genetically endowed ‘human nature’. Among the areas he explored was our ability to intuitively grasp certain concepts, while others remain abstract.
An example is a googol. Nowadays, googol – as it is pronounced – is synonymous with the search engine, and is a verb (I googled this) and I even an adjective (it’s googable). Originally, the word refereed to a very large number. After thousand (three zeroes), million (six 0s), trillion (9 0s), going up the nomenclature line, you reach a googol, a 1 with one hundred zeroes.
A number so large falls into the category of being abstract, as we cannot even conceptualize a million properly, and a thousand with difficulty. Because in our evolutionary history, we hadn’t the need to distinguish that many things at a time. A herd of grazing animals was maybe the most living things any of our ancestors saw at once, as for most of history the animals outnumbered us, until practically yesterday in the measure of millennia. A herd of animals would have simply been “awesome lot”.
As a species we’ve preferred to invent reasons for our existence. Uncomfortable facing the banal facts, instead we have invested centuries with thoughts that have deluded us into believing in ghosts and spirits and ‘supermen’ in the sky. What we are neglecting, and what we also seem to be incapable of grasping intuitively, is that we are a part of the Universe, and that we are part of the Earth, itself a part of the Universe, and that we are the result of sex which occurred not only between our grandparents but between creatures which lived millions – and billions – of years ago.
We’ve clouded the matter with the poetry of religion, which may teach that we are animated dust, but which is also uncomfortable facing the banal facts of evolution, preferring instead to discredit it as a fantasy. Beyond that, we have to deal with folk who think that panspermia (life coming from some asteroid) would somehow be more amazing than the fact that it sprang up on this stone we call Earth on its own. The Earth, far from being so special, is just a rock fostering many chemical reactions enabled by the presence of a significant amount of oxidized hydrogen. So far that fact seems unique, but it is not unreasonable to think that the universe is teeming with life of a variety we cannot imagine.
At the end of one of the chapters in Pinker’s book, he quotes Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary:
Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it had nothing but itself to know itself with.
This is an apt summary of what is so strange about our science. That our bodies are the instruments of our brains, by which a brain seeks to understand what it is. Although we are a system of organs and anatomy, it has taken centuries since the invention of the scalpel for us to figure out what we look like on the inside, and even what our brains look like. Accurate anatomy dates to within the past four hundred years, and extremely precise anatomy dates to the 19th Century. And mostly because we deluded ourselves with religious hoopla, afraid that dissecting a corpse would make It and Superman mad.
The brain is an organ capable of processing information revealing it’s own structure, of it which it knows nothing. I find it odd how we are born “knowing” how to use our hands, but not how they function. This seems to be a pattern repeated by the universe at large. The brain’s inherent ignorance about itself is a microcosmic reflection of a Universe which seems to know nothing of itself either. We think this way because we have labeled the universe a thing and as such, consider it inanimate, lifeless, and incapable of thought. However, what is going on between you and I right now except some sub-process of the Universe?
The last time you glanced at Astronomy magazine on the news-shelf, or read an article on cosmology, you participated in an aspect of the Universe seeking knowledge about itself, as it has agents within it seeking that information.
We are those agents – we are the organizers of the Universe’s information, and in many ways, agents for its change. For some reason, the chain of events which began with a big bang 13.7 billion years ago has led to reassembly of elements which have propelled themselves with precision across the vastness of space to land on Mars . The 3rd sphere seeks out information on the 4th sphere by way of beings which developed out of its matrix of chemicals a few billion years ago.
So, we have this recurring pattern: the universe organizing information, by way of humans, who do it by way of their brains. And now these brains have developed a new layer in the Universe’s information structure by organizing things using alternating currents of electricity. We are all told by those who developed this technology that the computer is a digital device which runs on a series of 0s and 1s, which represent on/off switches in the micro-circuitry. What this means is that the chips alternate the voltage between high and low. Electronic whispering is precisely that which allows me to type this and for you to read it. And to point out the obvious, my thoughts interact with your thoughts through this negotiation.
Now we have Google, a search engine, seeking to “organize the world’s information” to paraphrase their PR. We cannot know if the Googlebots are conscious, but let’s ask ourselves hypothetically, “what do they think they’re doing?” Do you think they are themselves curious as to why they are compelled to extend themselves through the branches of our communication network? Are they aware that they are a part of another being’s infrastructure? They go here, go there, go back to the Google servers, and collaborate on constructing a database. So much like ourselves and our travel stories and our maps. Essentially, the meaning of a google-bot’s life is to crawl the web and experience it so that it can later be organized – categorized, filed away, assigned i.d. Sound at all familiar?
Sounds like Victorian science to me. Darwin and the Beagle and the trip to the Galapagos, and the return home to the centre of the colonial empire to say, I saw this, and I think this about it and this is the book for the database, no, I mean library.
The flowering of life on Earth may be nothing more than some form of reflection of the masses of files we find on our hardrives. The zebra may be a .dll for something – a segment of code which enables another. We are a program running on the Earth’s Operating System, an .exe file enabled by .dll’s in the flavour of plants and animals by which we manifest an omnivorous nature.
Somehow our chemical composition – the fact that we are made of stuff – does not invalidate our activities, which we have recreated in the immaterial. By organizing electrons we have bypassed the molecular to achieve physical results which resemble our own activities.
Our relationship to the immaterial raises issues of the google-bot’s metaphysics. Do the engineers at Google program their algorithms to send prophet algorithms among them to inspire them to poetry and more accurate results?
With regard to the debates on right now with regard to posters and public space, I thought maybe I should share some thoughts I had last evening with regard to public space and culture. Not so much about posters, but advertising versus public art, like the Ferris wheel on the Harbourfront last summer.
To begin with, I want to borrow Simon Houpt’s report on The Gates, on now in New York’s Central Park. It was in yesterday’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).
“The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,” writes Houpt, “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. […] 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 (sorry I’m bringing him up again, it’s just that I’m in love with him) 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’. Lars makes this point in his posting (linked to above, but here again).
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.'” (the original was a reply to a post by Jennifer McMackon).
There’s also Montreal’s 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‘. And, it reminds us that when you can’t compete with ads on their own terms, a photocopier can be just as effective. If the city wants to get rid of posters, they should pass a by-law requiring billboard companies (like Viacom, which owns everything) to donate the space for a certain percentage of the year.
Coming out of that lecture, I was immediately confronted with Toronto’s pathetic attempt at a Times Square, that of Dundas. The debate is valid, in my perspective, in that I don’t mind messy poles, it makes me feel that I’m walking in a living city. It’s 21million times better than the waste of money that the redevelopment on Dundas represents. The posters, and the debate, tell me that while advertising may have co-opted the imaginations of many people so that public art projects are confused with them, there is a percentage of people for whom that hasn’t happened, and that’s the city’s artists. While ad agencies have tried to even co-opt graffiti as well with their murals (which have the double effect of usually being aesthetically pleasing, so I don’t mind them as much as I do billboards) their work will never be confused with advertising.
Jan Herman reports in a posting (2005.01.30) that John Zorn:
….repeatedly stressed that his music comes from some sort of higher power. He said that it would not have been possible for him to complete over 300 of his Masadic melodies during a very short time period without some sort of supernatural help. In the program, he writes that composition is at its best “when the piece is seemingly writing itself and the composer is merely an observer. He says that some of his works, “transcend my expectations and my abilities. I cannot explain them. They are part of the Mystery.”
Here we have an example of the need for a new language, a new understanding, of the creative process, one better informed by psychology than mystic mumbo-jumbo.
Psychologists tell us today that consciousness is a story teller. As Steven Pinker tells it on page 42 of The Blank Slate :
Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge (in fact, we are blind to detail outside the fixation point). […] One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus collosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one’s advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without it’s knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person’s left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up he will say, in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” – rather than, “I don’t really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You’ve been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don’t know exactly what you asked me to do”. Similarly, if the patient’s left hemisphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they saw (each using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, “Oh that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient’s left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind – the self or soul – is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. […] Often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.
This coincides with Malcolm Gladwell’s reportage in his most recent book, Blink which I haven’t yet read, but in a presentation (audio file available here, a fuller transcription from where I take these quotes is here) presented last October, he says:
We don’t have access to our unconscious, [we don’t know where are thoughts] come from that bubbles up from the recesses of our brain. So what do we do? Well, we have a behavior that we just did, we just made a decision of a certain kind, we don’t really know where it came from, so we come up with an explanation, we make up a story. And we’re really really good at making up stories. I call this The Story Telling Problem. And this is something that happens over and over again.
So both arguments imply that we need language to self-narrate understanding. Zorn’s example goes back to Socrates arguing that artists were inspired. Now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, we can put aside such mystical and primitive tales. The language of inspiration has been the only one available to us since the time of Socrates, and Zorn’s lack of knowledge of contemporary psychology means that to explain his creativity to himself, he falls back on that language.
As a creative person, informed by Gladwell and Pinker, I would argue that the mind is made up of many processes, and we are only ever conscious of a brief portion of what’s going. We tell ourselves stories to explain our actions, but those actions are being processed beneath or above the threshold were the “PR person” gets a hold of them. In Zorn’s case I would say that his musical facility means that a portion of his mind has great facility with music, and when it comes time to compose, this is brought to the awareness of the PR person and the part of his mind that directs writing and all that. However, the PR person is at a loss to understand just what is happening, because it doesn’t have the language to explain it. The only thing it has available for his ‘Coke story’ is to fall back on the mystical stories inherited from the time of Socrates.
My friend Izida and I were born 20 days apart on opposite sides of the world. She in Riga and I in Toronto. The circumstances of time have given her dual citizenship in three countries, one of which no longer exists. In January we’ll both be turning 30, and over the past month, as our friendship cemented itself outside of the vagueness of merely being acquainted, we’ve often described our ages to one another as being 30 although we are 29, and talked about what this means to us, how this chronological fact is modifying our perceptions of ourselves, how it is changing our lives.
We’ve been breathing air on our own for 29 years, but it is not entirely inaccurate to call ourselves 30 since three decades ago we were floating in our mother’s amniotic fluid, experiencing in an unconscious way this thing we later learned to call a body, or in Izida’s case, ??. Izida tells me she doesn’t remember Russia, from which she immigrated in 1980 at age 5. Her earliest recollections are of kindergarten in a synagogue basement in Winnipeg, sitting on the floor listening to people speak a language she didn’t understand and picking sparkles out of shag carpeting. These sparkles were her first Canadian treasures. She would bring them home, wet from the sweat in her hand, and hide them in her bedroom. My earliest memories go back to 1976, when my mother was pregnant for my sister. In 1981, I moved from Toronto’s west end borough Etobicoke to Clare, an area of Nova Scotia where my forefathers had lived since the late 18th Century.
A memory that works well means you begin to be dumbfounded one day, once those memories begin to pile up. Things that happened ten years ago can seem like something that happened last month. But this also confirms what adults tell you as you’re growing, that although their chronological age may be one thing, they feel like they’re another, an age quite young. My mother tells me she feels 19 although she is in fact 61. I escape this by being clever; I say that I’ve continued to grow and mature as I learn and experience new things, so I don’t feel like I did a year before and so on. But this is merely qualifying the fact that I recognize myself as an approximation of the person I was at 17, only with the issues that plagued me then resolved and new issues developing as I approach this 3rd decade.
It would be a fantasy if I tried to ignore the fact that I’ve grown up in a world enthralled by it’s extended nervous system, as McLuhan called our media technology. Approaching 30 means that I’ve become an adult without pretense toward being one, as one can be accused at 20. When I was growing up in the 1980s, there was a popular TV show called “Thirty-Something”. It was popular because it offered those boomers born in the 1950s a theatre by which they could explore the meanings and responsibilities of that age. They could articulate their anxieties and deal with their issues, issues of having survived the 1960s and 1970s, and the threat of the Cold War which caused them to question their future and perhaps encouraged their “live for today” irresponsibility and selfishness. Not that I ever watched it, after all, it was for ‘grown-ups’ and I was much more interested at that point in the new Star Trek show, but this is the understanding I bring to it today, being aware through osmosis of its popularity. I was perhaps a bit more aware of it than I would have been because it had more resonance on me, since one of the characters was played by an actor who shared my name, Timothy Busfield. Born in 1957 he is now approaching 50. (Some Google-fact checking reveals to me that this show ran from 1987-1991, although I would have guessed before that it had ran around 1983/84. While memory may contextualize one’s life, how often are those memories inaccurate?)
So what being 30 means to me is that I am now the subject of “grown-up” shows. And this is something which is a bit hard to accept about oneself in our culture as youth-obsessed as it is. It is so difficult to conceptualize that one feels the need to type out thoughts about it. What it means is that after spending three decades experiencing the world for the first time in a variety of ways, one has never been taken seriously by older folk. “Oh you’re just a kid” is heard over and over again. I am not expected to contribute anything significant – which is precisely why youthful stars and those called genius are considered so remarkable. I feel like many of my peers have never had the opportunity to experience themselves as anything other than someone youthful and not to be taken seriously and so they embrace that, feeling adulthood to be boring and limiting to their sense of fun, a sense which can make them as devilishly selfish as those boomers who have earned our loathing for leaving us a legacy of improvishment.
There is something else happening to us though, those of us 30-something both present and new. It is the fact that many of us feel that our age expectancy is not the official 70 something years, but having witnessed our grandparents live into their 80s and 90s, and those many that have lived past 100 have given us the idea that we too shall probably live at least as long. I myself think I’ll have an 80th birthday one day, and hope for the 100th as well. But perhaps we’re the first generation that will make living past 110 normal, in which case, being 30 means we are still as young and adolescent as many of us feel. An example I once came across illustrates this: if the age span was extended toward 250 years, meaning one at 247 was biologically equivalent to a contemporary 97 year old, then it would follow logically that for a given individual, puberty would only occur in their 30s. They wouldn’t reach their adult equivalent of our present 30 until their mid 70s. Over and over again in my journals, throughout my 20s, I’ve hoped that I’ll have a life span that makes my present concerns and problems as irrelevant to who I will be in old age as the misery of needing to have my diaper changed is to me now – a problem I’m sure I experienced but have no memory of and completely irrelevant to my problems today.
Turning 30 means that as an adult, I can no longer expect the sympathy bestowed on the naive. I am expected to be worldly and knowledgeable; to have confidence and not have to rely on others. The fact that my bank account is perpetually empty and I currently live on credit cards, dependent on my parents for meals and a roof, is not evidence of some youthful misadventure and indiscretion. It only reflects that I made a bad choice when figuring out a career – I decided to be an artist, a field which expects much without offering a guaranteed salary. I find myself in the ironic position of being extremely well educated and intelligent, believing that knowledge and powers of mind to be a form of wealth in which I am well stocked yet I have been unable to find a market of exchange where I can trade portions of this commodity for cash, to be able to become financially independent and secure. My issues today centre on trying to become concsious of whatever unconscious behavior I engage in which allows me to be free to read and work on my art projects while beating myself up for not having a regular 9-5 job which would provide for a healthy bank account and the sense of financial freedom while killing my soul by not allowing me to flower in the particular sunlight I need, that of learning and expression. My issues today centre on acquiring the independence expected of my age.
My peers, bruised by their experiences of family, do not understand how I can still live at home with my increasingly aging parents, nor can they understand why my sister would chose this as well. The sad truth is that so many of us, children of the 1970s, have found themselves in situations where it is difficult for them to get a foothold in the job-place and to be paid a salary sufficient for them to lead independent lives. This is true throughout the Western world. The issues that hovered over my psychology as a man in his early 20s have been replaced by “when can I move out? When can I get a full time job?” to say nothing of what I’m supposed to feel as a graduate of an art school: “when to I get that big solo show?” which I’ve come to see as not worth desiring anymore. Art has proven itself a mistress and now it’s time to find a wife.
One wants to contribute to society in a way that allows at least a salary, and at most, a contribution to the betterment of the planet. The world as it is in 2004, when I find myself less than 6 months from my 30th birthday, is so fucked up. However, that has been true for generations of 29 year olds. A Frenchmen born in 1759 would have written the same thing as someone from Massachusetts born in 1746, to say nothing of those who were born in 1910. The revolutions of history have given us a perpetual beta world in which change is commonplace and the displeased seek to rectify out of boredom and anger with their circumstance.
I for one am confident that the problems of the world today are constructed out of the idiocy of gray men with gray ideas. The War on Terror is as artificial as the War on Drugs and will not be won by a generation who’s mindset was formed during the Cold War; Israel and the conflicts of the Middle East will not be pacified by a government born in the 1920s, nor a generation who considers democracy optional. A generation which came of age at a time when the introduction of environmental legislation was considered controversial is not equipped to deal with the issues of global warming.
The habit of declaring “War” on our societal inconveniences and problems which have everything to do with a economic inequality and insufficient education will not solve these perpetuated problems which have nothing to do with simply being criminal behavior. A generation of men who have done a bad job of integrating women’s perspectives and who find glory in combative approaches are doomed to be the thought of as pathetic leaders for the rest of time, enshrined in the embarrassed conversations that will go like this: “How could they?” “I know I know…”. We are left waiting for them to remove themselves from the scene so that we can begin to clean up their mess.
Television and print news perpetuate certain world problems as being relevant, while doing a bad job of informing us on other more devastating conditions (such as the economic development of the Third World, or Africa’s devastating plague which represents an cruel economic inhumanity on the part of the west) means that yes, today’s “problems” are solvable because they are artificially important. The biggest problems, such as the economic inequalities which have led to the chaos of Africa and the Middle East, require new paradigms and perspectives that at this point can only be offered by the young. The future belongs to those of us for whom women in the workplace, environmental concern, and social critique are ambient and as such we have never known a world without them. Those of us who are presently 30 something, will be leaders and mentors to the true inheritors of the future, that mass of young people outnumbering 30 and 40 something Gen X and known as Generation Y, who I am told, are confident of their ability to change the world for the better.
Rick Groen opens his review of King Arthur with a lament:
“May the gods protect us from modernists messing with our myths. First it was Troy, recasting Homer as a humanist and leaching all those annoying divinities right out of The Iliad. And now we have another gang of contemporaries performing a legend-ectomy on poor King Arthur. So what was fodder for everyone from Malory to Monty Python is thin gruel here. Sorry, but expect no power in the sword and no magic in the sorcerer — goodbye Excalibur, adieu Merlin. As for courtly romance, or chivalrous knights, or jagged love triangles, or even a certain place called Camelot, they apparently didn’t exist. Heavens, it’s almost enough to make you thank the Lord for Mel Gibson — at least he had a passion for The Passion, and treated his hero as more than just another frail man nailed to a workaday cross”. (The Globe and Mail 2004.07.07)
And once again, I am stunned by the zeitgeist which has stripped scripts of myth to begin with. As he said, first there was Troy, and to a certain extant The Passion, but even it strove to be realistic, using dialogue that was supposed to be Latin and Aramaic, although tongues not used to hearing it everyday didn’t do a good job pronouncing it (I mean, I don’t know Latin, but know enough phrases from here and there to know that it wasn’t pronounced properly).
Let’s grant that both films were recorded in 2003. By doing this we can say – human nature or what not – we can’t pretend that these are problems that lend themselves to the saying, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. What we can say is that for the purpose of selling tickets and making lots of money – a vice the even Shakespeare was subject to – writers and producers have concocted costume dramas to explore the problems that face us a human beings at the turn of the 21st Century. And what both Troy, The Passion, and King Arthur show is an attempt to link our problems with a past now dissolved under education, plastic, and the inevitable gains of a thousand years of culture. But to tune it to today’s audience, they have made it atheistic and as realistic as they thought best. What this shows us is that today’s people are historically sophisticated enough to want to experience things as they may have happened, and that for the most part, we’re a secular population. However, this last point also lends itself as to why these films – Bruckheimer’s record – are heavy on battles and violence; because that sells well. A film heavy on dialogue and character development doesn’t translate well, but if you want to open this film in foreign markets – which lend themselves to the idea of an inconsistent education (what they teach kids in France ain’t what they teach kids in the inner city of the United States, to say nothing of what is taught in non-Western markets) you make a movie that strips out the cultural referent of religion and that goes for the ‘wow’ of spectacular violence.
Having gotten that out of the way, I want to address critics who are lamenting the lack of fairy-tale, to something we already well know. (An addition to the above paragraph would be: by creating a new version of a tired tale – something even Shakespeare was subject to as well – you create a new demand by the market to experience it).
What the reviews of King Arthur are failing to acknowledge – for no other reason than the apparent ignorance of the critics (otherwise I feel they should clarify their criticism with this knowledge) is that any one who has looked into this story knows, it was made up in the late Medieval Era, and further, was made up as Kingly Propaganda. It would be as if the President of the United States, seeking to assert a dictatorship, had someone write a story connecting his bloodline to the throne of England, and somehow made it seem that the Revolutionary War ended in a treaty of peace with a country later renamed Airstrip One. Playing loose with the facts, and knowing full well that the public is probably ignorant of those facts to begin with – one could do this and convince many. (Critics of Michael Moore posit this is pretty much what he does to begin with).
We should be aware that the ‘fictionalization’ of history has for most centuries been exactly how that field was conducted. Based on hearsay and rumour, people would write down what they’d heard – and what they heard may have included heavy doses of speculation. An oral history got taken up by Homer and turned into the Illiad; Edward I, wanting to legitimize his reign, took up the oral history of Arthur and began the process that would lead to Malory. Fictional history has for centuries also served as ‘practical history’ that is, what most people are exposed to and use in their lives, to whatever extant that history proves useful. Shakespeare’s History Plays were not going to be cross-referenced and looked into by the 16th Century audiences. They paid their penny and left the theatre knowing more about the past then they had when they’d entered.
Having read these negative reviews, I was surprised by how good the movie actually was. By the end though, I was really sick of hearing the word “freedom” and it made me think that this – as King Arthur always has – was meant as Kingly Propaganda for the American’s war on terrorism, full of the bluster and bullshit that the terrorists are engaged on a war on freedom. But it also serves as a reminder that the Americans in Iraq are the Romans in Britain, and that the Woads are those chopping the heads off of the colonials.
Historians agree that King Arthur as we know him – sword in the stone and all that – was based on an historical figure. They think he was someone who united the Celtic tribes to fight against the colonial Saxons, a English Vergentorix. However, we cannot describe him as English at all, since English is what resulted from the mix of these two peoples – the Celtic inhabitants (represented in the film by the Woads) and the Saxon’s seeking new land and opportunities. Fifteen hundred years later, Northern Europe appears to be a socialist utopia, dreary weather producing a society that takes care of everyone and leaving them free to invent and market cellphones. But before technology came around to make life more bearable (centralized heating in the winter, refrigeration in the summer – you know, all those things that prevent a winter starvation) it was a hard life up there. No wonder the Saxons were later known as the Vikings. But whatever – what matters here is that the historical and archaeological record shows that in the 6th and 7th Centuries, Saxons were ‘invading’ or perhaps we should say, ‘liberating’ what we now call England and Wales, and that it is reasonable to assume that to counter the raping and pillaging the tribes gathered together under a leader to have great battles and what not. That leader most probably died in battle – which would further his memory – and for centuries his story would be told.
We are so used to the technologies of memory and the whims of hearsay we don’t put much thought into what that means. I would say that for one thing, the oral tradition was probably a bit more refined than ours, decimated by our recording devices. But corruption of the account must have slipped in, and the next thing you know you’re dealing with Ring-Around-the-Rosy. We all know how that nursery rhyme goes, but it takes some effort to learn that it’s inherited from the time of the Plague. A pocket full of posy was supposed to help, but in the end, it’s “ashes ashes … we all fall down”.
A population used to experiencing the simulacrum of the time on a screen may be a little taken aback by such a direct connection to a past that really happened. I’m amazed that Hollywood – and Jerry Brukheimer for christ’s sakes – wants to give us a version of the Arthur story as if ‘this is what really happened, what the legend is based on’. That Troy too would strip the gods and ‘the magic’ from the story I think is a good thing. I think that it’s the best thing. I question why anyone would want to watch fairy-tale razzle dazzle. Perhaps this is one of the better things that a twenty-five year investment in deconstructive theories has brought us; a willingness to explore source material, and an impatience with mystical nonsense. What can one learn from watching either film? One, that there are no gods and there is no magic – two important things that every one of us should resign ourselves too. Psychologists are busy trying to figure out why we’d ever believe in such nonsense to begin with, and while each of us perhaps has a personal story to tell on why Faith in whatever exists for them I think it’s much more important if we agree to ignore it in public. (My position is that while I may believe in such-and-such, and while I may attend a church/similar to congregate with other believers, I should acknowledge the strong possibility that such beliefs are delusions, and if I’m unwilling to do that, as is my right, than I should at least agree to disagree with atheists and accept the position that “For all intents and purposes, these things don’t exist”). That being accepted, we have to find solutions and positions based on the dirt of reality, something much more able to accept sculptural forces than ephemeral hocus-pocus. As the transaction goes, ‘You may believe in Shiva, and I may believe in Allah, but neither will help us get this water pump built, so let’s put that aside and focus on our human problems’.
King Arthur balances the role the Church had in education in the Dark Ages with their freakishness. This itself plays into a contemporary bigotry toward practicing Christians, but it is also a fair and historical representation. Arthur goes on about a Palagius, who teaches all people are born free and are imbued with free will. The Bishop sent to the Wall refuses to tell Arthur that Palagius had been deemed a heretic and been killed a year earlier, only concerned with using Arthur’s knights to rescue the Pope’s favorite nephew, born into a Church aristocracy wherein he is meant for the Papacy, rather than having to work for it. The Bishop clearly displays the power politics of the Church at that time. It is the official religion of the Empire, and it has begun it’s relationship with governance and power that will last for the next thousand years until cultural stagnation inspires interest in what will emerge from the territorial battles with Muslims – forgotten knowledge and learning. We live in a time where the Catholic Church has divested itself of political power, but Christianity still pollutes secular governance, especially in the United States.
In one scene, Lancelot tells Arthur that the world he believes in – one without wars – will never exist. This line seems to be there for our ears, in 2004. I’ve come to believe that conflict is inevitable, but we shouldn’t accept that about violence. We could achieve a world without war, but there will always be a need for negotiation. And while there is a certain acrobatic appreciation for this blood and swords stuff, it is far better to watch it knowing it’s fakery, rather than accepting a need for war.
The world as we know as it is human; it is made up of human problems. The war in Iraq is one of the latest manifestation of a human problem, and for many of us, it is only an abstract injustice. If I had to walk kilometres for water in Africa for day to day survival, I don’t think I’d give a shit about the Mid East. Sure, the idiots who brought us this newspaper-CNN-Fox News-CBC Newsworld war have dressed it up in religious rhetoric, but if there is one thing studying the history of the Popes shows, is that God is a convenient lieutenant to the ambition of vain-glory. Achilles resented being such an instrument to Agamemnon, an example which shows how often being human, or specifically, being a male human bent on achieving and maintaining status, involves getting others to the dirty work. Donald Trump may be the king of his castle, but I bet he hasn’t licked a stamp or cleaned a toilet in years.
We need to films like Troy and now King Arthur to remind us that all we have is our humanity, and that the problems humans face are consistent with a human nature which our culture hasn’t dealt with. Some would say that myths were the narrative technology by which certain aspects of our nature were tamed; I would say that such technology is obsolete and now ineffective. We can’t return to anything, we can only acknowledge that each one of us is capable of great good things and great evil things, and being aware of precedents, examples from the past, is perhaps the only safeguard we have. Men will seek status and kill; other men will be the instruments of this action; others will be disgusted by it; a poet will be entranced enough to tell it to others, and as always, children will be eager to hear the stories that add that much more the newness of the world.
Summer 2004 blossomed with memories of the 19th Century. Unlike previous Junes of the past hundred years, this one began with the Transit of Venus, that planet named after the Goddess of Love, one of those unremarkable astronomic phenomenon which seem really interesting but which don’t quite measure up to the thrill of television or internet porn. Writing in 1882, William Harkness stated,
“We are now on the eve of the second transit of a pair, after which there will be no other till the twenty-first century of our era has dawned upon the earth, and the June flowers are blooming in 2004. When the last transit season occurred the intellectual world was awakening from the slumber of ages, and that wondrous scientific activity which has led to our present advanced knowledge was just beginning. What will be the state of science when the next transit season arrives God only knows. Not even our children’s children will live to take part in the astronomy of that day. As for ourselves, we have to do with the present …”
That day, June 8th 2004, I did not witness the transit, but saw pictures of it by that science of which God only then knew – television and the internet.
Those words were written in December 1882, the previous February of which brought into the world a baby named James Joyce. Twenty-two years later, on June 10th 1904, he met a girl on the street and asked her out. A normal enough thing for any 22 year old to do. She agreed but stood him up, being unable to get off work that evening. He ran into her again and they rescheduled. Today we go out for dinner and movies; I can’t imagine what they did that night a century ago. But we do know that at some point, down by an abandoned pier, she gave him a handjob that blew his mind and tied him to her for life. It was June 16th, and for this reason, ten years later, Joyce used this date for his ambitious novel Ulysses. I’m taken with the idea that as he came, Joyce had no conception that in a hundred years the English speaking world would not only know about this event, but would celebrate this day in his honour. This may have occurred to him later when he was composing the book, but as he gazed with gratitude and pleasure on the lovely Nora Barnacle, the world of a century from now was most certainly not on his mind.
The summer of 2004 was also when Andrea Fraser exhibited at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. This show rose above the usual apathy to make it into the media because its masterpiece consisted of a sex video. As the press release stated:
“Untitled, 2003 was initiated in 2002 when Andrea Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission were to include a sexual encounter between Fraser and a collector, which would be recorded on videotape, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited, sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera and existing lighting. “
The galleries website shows us a still near the beginning of the video of Fraser in a red dress holding two glasses of white wine. Having not seen the work I cannot judge whether this amateur porn lives up to previous masterpieces of that genre of which I consider myself somewhat a connoisseur. But what drives me crazy is this:
“Untitled is a continuation of Fraser’s twenty-year examination of the relationships between artists and their patrons“.
Ok I understand.
“Known for her performances in the form of gallery tours and analyses of collecting by museums, corporate art institutions, and private collectors, Untitled shifts the focus of this investigation from the social and economic conditions of art to a much more personal terrain“.
I’ve never heard of her before now. Am I bad? But ok, I think understand what her practice consists of.
“The work raises issues regarding the ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships as well as the contractual terms of economic exchange.”
What? I mean, she made a fucking sex video. That’s baloney.
Here’s the thing. I’m an artist, so I think I can say I know how the creative process works. I think I’ve had enough dealings with other artists to know that this is usually how it works for most of us. And my feeling is that she thought this guy was hot and wanted to do him; further, she had the wherewithal to frame it within the context of her practice and using a magic spell of theory was able to get her sextape on the wall. She didn’t even give it a title, which is really revealing. Unlike Paris Hilton, who was famous for her green-light blowjobs before her ignorance of Wal-Mart, this from the get-go was meant to be shown off, but it was also an excuse for Fraser to get laid. All well and good and I congratulate her on her cleverness and the originality of her seduction. But the work does not “raise ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships”. It’s a simple porn. It might raise these issues if you were an alien. Let’s ignore for a second how typically pathetic that press release is and just assume that all art galleries are currently engaged in the same bullshit, thinking this is what we – an audience of intelligent people – want and expect.
And that I think that’s what I finally understand – the art-world orients itself to non-humans. The texts that accompany art works are meant to explain them to dolphins, squid, elephants and ravens, or whatever intelligent non-human life is in outer space. To entertain the “questions raised” is to enter a state where we deny our common humanity for the cheap thrill of speaking of a sex video in terms of the sociological, something most likely done with others in a social situation to begin with, and something that has been done to death already to no apparent end.
A conversation is afterall the transfer of things in my head into yours, ephemeral ideas rather than genetic material encased in goop, as is transferred during sex. What Fraser’s video shows, undoubtedly, is the limited repertoire of the sex act itself. I’m guessing here, but I have a feeling that the missionary position features more prominently than it should. If she were really familiar with this genre, it would proceed thus: she gives him head, he gives it to her. They then engage in intercourse, which can begin missionary, but than becomes doggie style and then moves on to butterfly. Anal sex usually occurs at this point, but that’s usually left to the professionals, as amateurs are far more mundane and stick with vaginal. Eventually he comes on her face.
We’re taught that voyeurism is wrong but I don’t really see why, given that it’s put up there for our consumption. Like meat, once it’s dead you might as well eat it. The problem in both cases is in the creation. I think it’s wrong to treat animals as another product, and I’m willing to accept that there are big problems with the creation of pornography, but all the stuff I’ve ever seen as appeared to be harmless to both parties, and further, both sexes appeared to enjoy their job. How many of us can say the same?
The next time I’m down by the pier with a hot girl, who unzips my pants and is about to create 22nd Century literature, I’ll stop her to raise questions about interpersonal exchange. Perhaps this would be entirely appropriate. Should we start treating the theoretical discourse as a form of sex then? The same old same old, going through the same motions and the same arguments, over and over again until the end of time or at least until the next Dark Ages. I mean, is this why such intellectual deceit has survived this long?
For some reason, watching folk going through the same sexual motions isn’t quite as boring as listening to folk go through the same motions with regard to theory. Theory is a magic spell whose power diminishes with overuse. “Abracadabra you are now a rabbit!” is the same as “You’re sex-act questions issues regarding the ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships as well as the contractual terms of economic exchange!” The same way a string of words recontextulaizes and object or a situation into magic, another string of words lends something pedestrian an air of respectability and intellectualism. But a duck is still duck, even if we call it Anas platyrhynchos. ‘Abracadabra’ can be a special word to children, but to adults it’s most likely to be associated with the Steve Miller Band.
I would say that because the act of sex is embedded in our genes, we are not programmed to find it or the acts that accompany it boring. Experience shows that there is a predictable payoff of pleasure, and this pop in our minds is that which creates those actions to begin with. We are not engaged in the same thing with a theoretical discourse. We are not driven to say and do things because we know intuitively that there’s a bubble of pleasure at the end, the argument won, the cigarette reached for, the slow squinting sigh. This is true for me at least, but I’ll grant there are probably people out there who get off on intellectualism. Won arguments might be orgasmic for some, but I find it so much fluff, words lost on the wind, no more memorable than any other walk by the pier with a conservative girl.
So, my conclusion is this. Theory is predictably used to recontextualize the banal – including sex acts – to make them seem far more significant than they are. It is written by folk who have no interest in addressing real human beings who have real experiences from which to draw and analyze situations. It assumes an audience ignorant of real life, and thus tries to tell us something we already know in an alternative language, which in the end simply insults our intelligence. But like Magic, where a string of nonsensical gibberish is playfully used to transform something – most often the surrounding context – artspeak attempts to transform the banal into something deserving of intellectual consideration; but fails since, as I said, it appeals only to the intellects of non-human life forms, or, as is the case, those among us willing to suspend that part of our knowledge that comes from the real world. However, I’ll grant that the persistence of this might mean that like a sex act, the limited repertoire of ideas and motions have an intrinsic value which account for the lack of innovation therein, and why enough people are willing to suspend their real-world knowledge to engage in a ‘discourse’ at this level.
How did I begin to think about what an idyllic landscape was? I am fond of springtime mud, since it reminds me of good times in the springs of my childhood. But I’m thinking of how cool it would have been to play in some of the landscapes of Ajax…that stream, that hill, seem perfect for imagined scenarios, playing soldier, playing castle, and yet, they are so unsuitable because of the pollution, because of the highways. They are fragments of a greater ideal
Where 22nd Century characters walk, and say,
“My, look at that stream, these lovely trees, this beautiful park”.
For my adult mind, where sci-fi has taken over the role once occupied by castles and forts, there is something “utopian” in the ways these parks are designed, and I think about how things like this, parks, the landscaping, in residential areas are built to last. (Although, unfortunately, it is conceivable, that they too could be plowed over one day for another high-rise).
These parks are beautiful, in the same way that Chinese social realist art is beautiful – well designed and executed, but undermined by a disturbing ideology. The parks are like IKEA furniture made with grass and trees. Here, it’s a human imposition upon nature, which is something that needs no human presence to function correctly.
The stream is now clear,
in this constructed geography.
The streams are now filthy. Every time I walk to the train down the street, I pass over a portion of the main stream that flows around here. Last September I saw a heron standing in it, which seemed out of place considering how polluted the stream is. Usually when I cross that bridge, I admire the slope of its hills and the flow of its water which reflect the perfect stage from which to play mediaeval scenes.
It too once had walls, but these have been absorbed by its own red-brick urban development. Could it be that in 500 years, historians will look back and talk about our time in a similar way?
It’s a comforting thought, to see the all of our creative energies, to look at all of the resources we use to construct art objects, like films, and TV shows, which future historians would look at without the hierarchies of High and Low that we use today, and they would marvel at this time period, when computers and cars and robots are new.
But at the same time, what are the chances that civilization has at least 500 more years to go, what with the way we are squandering our resources (for example, plastic comes from oil, oil is non renewable, and look at the waste plastic grocery bags represent)? In addition to the stockpile of nuclear weapons and the shortsightedness of the business and the political elite?
At least, if we go out, it’ll be on a high note, eh?
The technonaissance, or The Late Age of Capital.
The Late Age of Capital – I borrowed this term from an historian, who wrote a book called A Short History of the Future(1). The book is many things – a sci-fi novel, a projection of current trends, and an academic exploration of our current utopian ideas. In the book, the mid 21st Century is marked by the third world war. Nukes destroy the Northern Hemisphere. From the ashes of this capitalist civilization, a new socialist world government arises [Utopia # 2] whose economic philosophy is anti-capitalist along the lines of: Never again will we allow the world to become so crappy by allowing short sighted profiteers to override human concerns.
The early days of plastics
I was going to the Royal Ontario Museum a lot last year. I had seen the movie Gladiator and was struck by certain aspects of it that clashed with the world as I knew it today. Especially the line where Maximus tells the Emperor about how his child plays with wild ponies. I certainly wasn’t able to play with wild ponies as a child. This reminded me of our relentless desire to “tame” nature and the fact that we are driving so many animals to extinction, which is an immeasurable loss.
“Not: Don Boudria. Liberal House Leader slams the MP pay raise through in record time, the endangered-species bill still waiting four years after it was first introduced.”
–The Globe and Mail, Saturday 9 June 2001, page A5, Political Notebook Who’s Hot Who’s Not
One of the things that struck me going through the rooms, was the lack of colour in the ancient world. We forget today the power of purple, and how expensive blue was for most of our collective human history. I’m standing there looking at clay pots and jars, everything is coloured in browns, and other earth-tones, and I think about growing up with coloured Tupperware, inexpensive and mass produced.
With a Nova Scotia Tuscany and an Ontario Rome.
Let’s not kid ourselves. New York is the place to be an artist in North America. It is the “capital of the world” as many have said. But I was struck while living in Halifax with how vibrant the artistic culture was, and how so many things my fellow art students were doing seemed to me to be just as cool as the stuff I was reading about it Artforum. But the media structures are set up in such a way so that only when you read about something or see it on TV, only when it is reproduced in the media, does it become “legitimized”.
While I was growing up in southwestern Nova Scotia, I developed an interest in Leonardo da Vinci, and subsequently, an interest in the Renaissance. You could say that I am guilty of wanting to live during that time, sentenced to a desire to at least visit it (using the latest in time machine technology), how I’d love to meet Da Vinci and Michalanglo. I am also fascinated by how they have ceased to be human and are now characters in a greater metanarrative told by our Western Civilization, examples of the “artistic genius” as well as the “great dead white European male”.
But growing in up Nova Scotia, one is confronted with hype at an early age. “Nova Scotia, Canada’s Ocean Playground”. We’re all sailors, we all love sailboats and all of our ancestors smoked pipes, wore yellow sou’westers and said “argh”. I am frustrated that the contemporary artistic culture in Halifax is ignored in favor of folk art. I came to think of Nova Scotia as being somewhat like Tuscany in the 15th Century and Halifax as it Florence – the common rurality, the milky light vs. the Tuscan haze, and how people now as then, and all over the world for that matter, come to the city to do business and to be part of culture as a whole. They come to Halifax to study and live out the university student lifestyle. But then, they leave. During the Renaissance, Florentine artists like Michealangelo left to go to Rome, where there was opportunity to work for Pope Julius II.
I probably should have written, New York Rome…
Red brick homes
Part of the fascination with the suburban landscape began while walking, especially the walk up the hill when I wanted to browse in Chapters. These subdivisions are homogenized by style and by substance, a reddish brick that reminded me of photographs of Tuscany and Florence.
Behind walls – made of wood, designed to keep out the highway noise, like cellular walls bordering the capillaries and the arteries.
In addition, they are surrounded by fences, which exist for a variety of purposes – to demarcate territory, for security, but also, in some cases, to help baffle the noise of the traffic. And the traffic in itself is fascinating.
It’s a fractal – the microcosm of an organism in the macro scale. Blood cells carry oxygen to the cells and the organs, and here on the 401, cars carry information, in the form of people, to the organizations – corporations, libraries, art galleries, museums, sporting events. They rest in homes, which are like individual cells. One day, the city as organism will say, “Within each home is a computer, containing the codes that make us up….”
II. Parks Canada –
For a long time now I have been interested in how the future would look upon the present. Perhaps this is because of my upbringing, my education, having gone on field trips to Port Royal and visiting Louisberg on family vacations, as well as coming to art through the study of the Renaissance. My education taught me the connection between history and the objects people leave behind. This was further developed while at university, when I studied some archaeology, before going to art school.
I remember walking through the streets of Halifax early in the morning, especially one time in June of 1998, when I was coming home from Tim Horton’s and walking along Birmingham Street. It was around 5.30am and I was struck then by the silence, the emptiness, the cars parked and still, and yet, because of the time of year, it was daylight. It felt like our historical villages, like Louisberg, Fort Anne, Port Royal, and Citadel Hill; these so called “authentic” re-creations, which are distinctly underpopulated and underdeveloped. The animators dress in “period costume” and yet, I imagine that no clothing from that time was so clean or so well made. But it doesn’t matter – it’s all engineered to suggest, to awaken a spark of imagination that will ignite a fuse which in turn, will violate the laws of time and allow one to experience the only form of time travel we know. It’s about helping us conceive of a time when soft drinks and automobiles did not exist.
But what about using that spark to travel forward in time?
“In this year of 1999, we have essentially arrived in the future that writers and films have dreamed of since the birth of science fiction, and so our science fiction is now turning its eye either inwardly to the present or to new visions of the 21st century built upon what we know now.” (2)
I have always been interested in the future as it has been depicted in the media. While growing up I regularly became a fan of whatever TV show had some basis in the future, which usually involved the 21st Century. (3) In moving to Toronto, I was partially interested in living in a world that William Gibson described in his novels, a world where ecocide has been pursued until concrete and technology are all that humanity seems to ever have known.(4) I wanted to ride its trains – trains are so sci-fi – and I wanted to look at “urbanity”, in a context that was different from what I had known in Halifax. But my fascination with seeing a fiction as a reality soon disappeared as the illness of it all became apparent – the fact that it is ecocidal, which is turn, translates eventually into being suicidal.
And so, as I drove around Ajax, loathing its car friendly design over the pedestrian, the seeming insane joy at development, and the confirmation of certain suburb stereotypes (the popularity of SUV’s for instance) I began to think, this is all an historicism. These things will not last.
Pretending then, to see this area as a Parks Canada historical recreation of what we call urban sprawl today, and my neighbors as actors of “what life was like in a consumerist capitalist culture”. But also seeing it as a moment in time, the turn of the 21st Century, the time when our technology is still fresh on the scene, the period of the “birth of technology” and thus, the technonaissance. Such a time has its own aesthetic characteristics, which I am interested in.
III. The Present, The Technonaissance
What are today’s aesthetic characteristics? On some of the invites the words were cut off at the edge. At first, this kind of bothered me, but then I remembered when I used to do that on purpose, inspired by Raygun magazine’s notorious layouts…it’s what Heidegger pointed out with the nature of being, that only when something is broken does its being reveal itself. Broken text reminds you that you’re reading – that you’re only looking at symbols.
The text broken by the deckled edge, a roughness we plow under, a weed we spray Roundup on. Why I am bothered that some of the text is imperfect? Because it doesn’t correspond to manicured lawns?
I remember thinking that Raygun expressed well the chaos of today, how everything is dissolving into subgenera and fractals of everything else, cohesion provided only by the media, the frame of the TV or the computer screen. But I don’t think about that so much anymore. I just see it now as a celebrity obsessed childish culture, an idiot’s paradise where thoughts and ideas are rejected in favor of the new and the shiny, and we are taught to consume like fat friars in medieval parodies, taking one bite out of the chicken leg before tossing it behind their shoulder, moving one to take one bite out of the apple before it too gets thrown away. This food, that the peasants worked so hard to produce…
And where do fat friars live today?
A park for tourists, to experience an idiot’s paradise in an enlightened future?
“It’s everywhere. Canadian politicians buy trendy eyewear. Al Gore is advised by Naomi Wolf to wear earth tones. BBC World runs a segment on Brazilian show salesmen having their buttocks enlarged with silicone. Men’s Health instructs their readers to wear, in this order: leather, stiff collars, turtlenecks, unvented jackets, untucked shirts, non-pastels, layers, colour combinations, monochromes, contrasting collars and clothes that are too big. The underlying message is ‘You’re just not good enough.’ Fixing your flawed self will cost money. That’s the whole point of articles like that: They damage self worth and then rebuild it by means of expensive accoutrements urged on by the magazines advertisers’.” (5)- The Globe and Mail, Saturday 23 June 2001
That the whole point of the constructed geography. Nature by itself just isn’t good enough. We have to damage its intrinsic value, destroy what’s there, to rebuild it in the image that suits the bourgeois demographic. And given that such a suburban environment typifies so well this day and age, is it not conceivable that in two hundred years, Parks Canada (if it still exists) will reconstruct one and fill it with animators having back yard barbecues, wearing flip flops and drinking beer? They’ll make a big show about going to the grocery store in an SUV.
These reconstructed parks, what are they other than the commodification of the landscape? What then is tourism other than the commodification of geography? These parks are about rebuilding, recreating, using “authentic” techniques, in order to make the illusion as real as possible. But of course, some things are not reproduced, like having the animators toss chamber pots out the windows in the morning. The smell of these parks is our smell. Side rooms that would have originally been storage closets or the like now contain porcelain toilets and sinks. The modern bathroom is a convenience that none want to do without, even for the sake of the past.
And these subdivisions, so uniform in appearance, aren’t they not the result of a plan, of a developer plowing under a farmer’s field, once used to grow food, so that they can build crescents and cul-de-sacs, commodify the landscape by turning it into real estate? And this real estate, with its parks that exist pragmatically as soccer fields and baseball diamonds – what does that say about the demographic that they imagine want to live in a suburb? They don’t preserve grasslands for young artists to wander through and daydream, where they can find wildflowers or what-nots. No, they impose the order of the sporting event; “this field exists so that boys can learn patriarchal games” – so that they learn the value of cooperating in order to compete, rather than to make the world a more livable place.
“In 2019, at a special closed high-level session in its Zurich world headquarters, the GTC approved a high-priority project to design the “perfect” man and woman. Shielded from public discussion, the GTC directors decided that perfection included not only lofty intelligence but also a ruthless competitive instinct and a dollop of energizing paranoia”. (Wagar 1999:93)
The only possibility for hope in such a world is to play the time travelling historian. The works in this show, photographs and drawings, are evidence, are explorations and illustrations of ideas, and they are an attempt to route out the fascinating sci-fi elements of this environment, hoping that one day, it will be a part of history.
What has caused humanity to be so successful? Why, it is not the exploitation of resources, the treatment of our surroundings as a room full of tools? Whereas we have reserved certain elements of our environment for reverence, for the most part, we have treated our environment, and fellow creatures, both human and nonhuman, as a means towards an end. Our religious philosophies have created a reverence for certain aspects of existence, however, in this time and place, such reverence is more of a tradition, or even, a delusion, since it is rarely respected in “the everyday world”.
It is my ever-growing belief, (if I may borrow from Judeo-Christian theology) that far from being a species favored and created by God, it would almost seem that humans were created by the Devil, to thwart God’s majesty. For, wherever humans go, destruction and death follow. The ancient creatures of the Ice Age, are extinct, and it makes sense to assume that it was by over hunting. (That in itself is revealing, that we can assume over hunting as a cause of extinction). Of course, science would like to find some other cause, to deflect the guilt that suggests human-causation. As well, of all the other hominid species, we are the only one left. There is the suggestion of wars in our ancient past, a possilbility that the Neanderthals were killed off by Homo sapiens sapiens, (I even harbour the pet theory that our stories of ogres and trolls are nothing more than a diluted form of oral history of interactions with the Neanderthals and the other species of our common hominid past) and then the centuries, no, millennia, of empire building and life that was “nasty, brutish, and short”. It seems easy to see Humans as fundamentally evil creatures, due to a defect of consciousness, or perhaps due to our ability to rationalize any absurdity.
The Nazis were able to rationalize the murder of the Jews by thinking of them as vermin. There is the famous example the Auschitz commandant’s wife who had a lampshade made of the tattooed skin of one of the victims. How is this any different from a fur coat? Isn’t it harder today to see life, especially human life, in terms of Reverence and the Sacred? Is it not true that what we object to is not the killing of a human being, rather, we object to the killing of the human form. If a life form is a quadruped, its life is meaningless, and its death is given meaning by the use we, as bipeds, will put it too. We deny the emotions and intelligence of animals, while we assume that any animal of the human form has the potential for a meaningful life. Some of us oppose abortions and capital punishment, while treating our children to Macdonald’s hamburgers. Evidence for the intelligence of animals is treated with skepticism, while the intelligence of humans is always seen as a given. If you could measure the IQ of a an cow, and it was found to be the equivalent of that of a 12 year old human, would we still be so comfortable wearing it’s skin or eating it’s muscle, or would we suddenly allow for the consumption of children? Of course, we all know the answer. We continue to spoil our kids and deny that animals have consciousness. There would be some other group brought in, funded by the meat industry or the government, who would search through the procedure of measurement with a fine toothcomb in order to disprove the result. The animal must remain a tool for our use. We must continue to eat and experiment on the flesh of those who do not share our form.
How can we not witness the bulldozers and the pits, the carcasses of “livestock” in Europe, massacred for having sores on their mouths and feet, burned and buried en masse, and not think of those black and white films from the liberated concentration camps? Why is one seen with shame and horror and the other, these films of burning cattle, are seen only as unfortunate? What I am saying is that it is as wrong to murder cows for having blisters as it is to murder humans for being jewish. And the fact that no one cares, that the PETA folk aren’t in the news and in the streets raising hell and chastising us for our complancey, is revealing of the human character, to dismiss the value of life as irrelevant. They have said repeatedly, that the “foot and mouth disease” is not contagious to humans, and that the animals are murdered as a trade measure, since being sick, they cannot put on weight as easily, and their market value declines.
In little under a month, protestors will gather in Quebec City to protest the Free Trade of the Americas proposition. One of their fundamental claims is that market values ignore human values. Is this horror in Europe not an example? We kill them because their market value has become worthless. And when we think of one of the most famous example of the despicable genre of Holocaust film, Schindler’s List, how was it that the Jews were saved? By being a cheap form of human capital. By using Jews in his factory, Schindler was able to cut costs and – most importantly for the film and for his place in history – keep them alive. One of the early scenes in the film shows the Jews exchanging market information – where to find a shirt and what not. Here is an abominable message, tres au courant for our age. That the value of a human life is only concurrent with what they can create for a market. That whole monstrous concept of “human capital” is the only measure of a life’s value.
In another Speilberg film, Saving Private Ryan, there was a revealing line, to the effect that “this fella better find the cure for cancer or something…”. At the end of the movie, we learn that no, he didn’t find the cure for cancer, he apparently led an average life, had a wife and kids and grandkids, and he asks with tears, was their sacrifice worth it? Of course his wife answers yes, and his proud kids and grandkids hug him, and the American flag flies proudly, but sadly, bleached out into transparency to evoke that emotional semiotic. In God they trust. Life has value in and of itself. Of course, such lesson is learned only after watching male bodies blown to pieces for two hours. Human life, we are taught through these media messages, is only valuable in terms of “human capital”, and that killing is fine, as long as you are not killing animals that are shaped in the human form, but even that’s okay if they are wearing the wrong uniform and live in the wrong country.
Saying this, however, I imagine that many will ask about those humans who are not of the form, the deformed and disabled. What I mean by human form is what is self-evident. We never confuse a member of our species with any other. We know what the template is. The fact that we describe some people as deformed or disabled reveals our acknowledgement of a template. And this template is what I am referring to. This template we are taught, is sacred, or at least, is illegal to mess with. The fact that our genetic research threatens that taboo, is a cause for “ethical” concern. This ethical concern could quite easily be maneuvered around – one way is to rationalize the human in terms of the animal. It is amazing to me that such a thing as ethics still exists within the context of the discourse, that there is even such a field as bioethics, given the ease at which we justify the moral violations which are narrated for us everyday on television and in popular songs.
One of the easiest ways to get around these ethical concerns is to throw in the concept of art. This always raises the amoral shield that is the freedom of expression. Let us express ourselves through genetic manipulation, stem cell research, abortions and capital punishment. I will draw upon my education at an art school, point to the wall where the document which says I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine arts degree, and say, I am artist because this is so. Will any body challenge me? Will anybody say, “graduating from an art school doesn’t automatically make you an artist”? Will anybody say, “what makes you an artist is seeing the world is a different, enlightening way, than others”? No. I will go unchallenged, pointing to the paper, and use the authority that I supposedly have, to arrange for an execution as a means of expression. I could perhaps rely on the tradition of the readymade, and sign my name to the acts that Texas seems to love so much. Art critics will compare my work with the prints of Warhol, and judge me accordingly. But, under the freedom of expression, my murders will be constitutionally guaranteed.
Imagine. Such an act has already been imagined and described by David Bowie. In is 1995 album Outside, he published a short story describing a detective’s investigation of a millennial murder of an adolescent girl and the task of determining whether or not it was art. In his story, he brings up examples from post war art practices which incorporate violence, the most revealing, (and perhaps the most famous), being the Viennese Actionists. In 1966, Herman Nitch killed a sheep, crucified it, and rolled around in its organs. This was supposed to be an expression of some sort. But the questions that Bowie’s story raised, and which I have pondered ever since first reading that story in 1997, was, what is the difference between a sheep and a human? Why is it that the killing of this sheep goes unpunished by the law, whereas such an act, as described by Bowie, performed on human, would not only by prosecuted, but would most likely be the most famous murder case in the world? Growing up in a rural area, I remember witnessing my friend’s father “getting rid” of the family cat with his revolver, and years later, while I was hunting in the forest, finding the skeletal remains, poking through a plastic bag, of a dog which had been similarly disposed of. Here I was, with a shotgun in my hands, engaging in an activity of sanctioned murder, finding the body of a victim that had no rights to medicare or an old age home, but was simply “disposed” of.
And I have to admit that I am no saint. My shoes are made of a cow’s skin. I eat meat. And no one is going to persecute me for it. Of course, I am open to the accusation of being a hypocrite. Yes, that’s true. Here I am, rationalizing that it is wrong to live this way, to eat meat knowing full well it is a form of murder, to watch the bodies of cows and sheep burning in the English country side, and yet, feeling as guiltless as anyone else. And in that, I am a fully contemporary human being well brought up and indoctrinated into the values of my society. In acknowledging the wrongs, while being complacent, to view those who eliminate animal products from their lifestyles and diets as some kind of “fringe” group, I am as monstrous and despicable as everybody else, and yet, I can see no great change coming to humanity anytime soon. As piece of human capital, as employees, to rebel against this fundamental societal philosophy would destroy our market value, and then perhaps, we might end up burning in piles on the countryside.
Found within the opening pages of the February 1998 WorkbookThe beginnings of my manifesto, what I am doing, what my themes are.I. Doodles
You could say it began with Jerusalem, the drawing I did in 1994 and exhibited at Saint Mary’s. I could say that I was subconsciously aware of the stick figure as being a legitimate art technique, but being subconscious, it was bellow the surface. I was interested in learning to draw like Picasso – I didn’t pursue stick figures then.
I purchased Radiohead’s The Bends in October of that year. It had been released the previous spring. It contained stick figure scrawls of Stanley Donwood and Thom York. I looked with interest at first, but saw only “doodles” and left it. I did not then see it as art.
In December 1996 I was channel surfing and stopped briefly at the New Music, when they were interviewing k.d. lang. She picked up Basquiat Drawings (1990) and said how much she liked a particular drawing, ‘Plaid Plaid Plaid’ and commented that this explained lyrics to her. A few weeks later Dad surprised me by bringing this book home, which he found for $3.99.
This book inspired me as set me trying to incorporate text and imagery. That was in January 1997.
In June 1997, Radiohead released Ok Computer. Again there was the drawings of Stanley Donwood. I admired the design but again, thought little of it.
Then that September, I was walking through the halls of NSCAD when some signage drawn up by Tullis Rose caught my eye. My immediate thought was of OK Computer. Here were the sketches! Here was the same concept. This made me think that there was something more to these mere doodles.
Later, the same month, Randy Laybourne exhibited a collection of his drawings. Some where done spontaneously and shared that doodle quality.
In November, early November, this all coalesced and I collected Tullis’ ads where I could still find them. I copied out the drawings from the Radiohead CD booklets. Jessica Jones, who was a fellow student in Interim Painting, left some sketches laying around, on black paper done with chalk. The stick figures – I asked her for it but she wouldn’t part with them.
I sat out to understand the doodle. I began drawing doodles. And my tag in October which began as simple graffiti, but struck me for being so self-contained. (Five year old draw like that – every man is an artist -who drew this at age 5? Because I was drawing it at age 22).
Melinda gave us an assignment, to paint outdoors. She gave us a list of artists we might want to refer too. Basqiuat came up. I asked he why he was on the list. She said because he was a good urban artist, how he had responded to his city.
I bought two drawings from Randy. I doodled like crazy, trying to understand, and to find that which I liked in other’s in my own. Now, I see connections between Basquiat and Donwood, the other night finally recognizing the symbol from Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook. Basquiat used some symbols from this book and so did Donwood.
Every man an artist – Life as art as being an organizer, a way of creating order in Postmodern fragmentation and disorder.
The importance of influencing others since we are all accumulations.
The appeal of the doodle is represented in the primacy nature of it – it’s simplicity, spontaneity, and what the Beats codified as “first thought best thought” . My own experience has show me that first thought best thought creates art that is inspired and caries that mark. There is no fear of the contrived. However, not all first thoughts are golden, and first thoughts often reside amongst the cultural cliches. First thought with awareness then.
And of course, the fact that anybody can do it.
II. Everyone an artist
Apparently it was Joseph Beuys who came up with that phrasing. But the idea isn’t that new or original. In 1966’s Creative Writer, a series of talks given on CBC’s radio program Ideas, the Canadian poet Earl Birney said:
“Some psychologists say, and I agree with them, that creativity is the sense of the drive to find new things, explore, discover, is basic to the human animal. I think all children who aren’t born into absolute idiocy are artistically creative. With a favorable kind of environment and education, most of them, I suspect, grow up retaining some creative powers as men and women. But there’s a strong urge to conform, to become dependent on others, to accept instruction, guidance, doctrine, to stop really thinking, or even feeling, for one’s self. Artists are people who resist this conforming pressure, at least with part of their energies.”
This is what Joseph Beuys refereed to – this basic factor is creativity, that we all create constantly. Beuys put it this way:Thinking Forms – how we mould our thoughts or Spoken Forms – how we shape our thoughts into words or Social Sculpture – how we live: Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone an Artist. Thorsten Scheer, on the website http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~schoenfe/ep/ep963.html expands on this.
“Beuys’ plastic theory is not about plastic/sculpture in the traditional sense. It’s about form. In Beuys’ opinion, the central question of art is the question for the most suitable form. This means that _everything_ is a question of art, because _everything_ has to have a certain form: politics, communication, TV sets, words, e-mails… All you can imagine. But the question for the most suitable form does usually not occur until one has to work with real material. However, at first, there is a thought, an idea. The process to create a sculpture therefore emerges right the moment you get an idea. Ideas have to be shaped, constructed, put into form, just like material works. […] Living on this planet, in a society, _everything_ you do, every idea you have, all the stuff you create, every conversation you have (sending mail to Athena, too) shifts the state of the environment, creates form – therefore is sculpture..! You are responsible – no way out.
So take your life as a work of art with regard to society – the Social Sculpture.” This idea, that we are constantly responsible for everything we do, and that all acts are creative and thus artistic acts, is the beginning of my thoughts on art as an almost religious experience, capable of providing unity to life.
Everyone an artist though – I do not want to see every citizen of the world have a one man show. I believe that every human is a creative creature, as Earle Birney wrote. However, we are not all artists. Some of us are businessmen. Some of us are tradesmen. We are all born with different talents and interests. Artists are born. If you feel yourself to be athlete, then you are. This basic fact that we are all born different assures us that artists will have a place and that their gifts have a place. However, the nature of art changes and the nature of the artist changes. The nature of art must change and is changing.
In this new world I do not know what place the gallery has. This gallery, is a graveyard of ideas, a museum of trends, a sanctuary for ivory tower pansies.
III. Art Itself
Art itself – what is art? Art is the product of the artist. It is the by-product of the creative act. The creative act is an exploration, an attempt to understand. The creative act in the artist arises out of the need to understand something. Some idea ignites curiosity, desire, obsession. You want to wrap your brain around something. To od this, you reach out, explore a medium. Thought goes from ephemeral interior winds to physical manipulations of materials. The art object thus becomes a record of physic energies – a record and report by the artist. It is a hard copy of thought not in the usual word form, but in the form of shapes.
So this is what art is. Art is also that which enriches your experience, it is life affirming, it is beautiful. Much historical thought has gone into trying to define two things – God and Art. What is hard to define in both perhaps is the concept of beauty. It is beauty which is so subjective and which confuses the idea of what art is. Art as the totality of experience. The role of the artist is to affirm life. To show people what they are capable of.
The Age of Enlightenment
a summary
by Timothy Comeau
November 18th 1991
The Age of Enlightenment was the period between the 17th and 18th centuries when man’s thoughts became free of many of the chains which had enslaved them for centuries.
Our modern day life began in this age. Today, we all live lives based on technology, the resulting product of science.
The importance of the Age of Enlightenment is that is was in this era that technology was born. The scientific ideas produces during the scientific revolution were for the first time applied to everyday life.
Benjamin Franklin experimented with electricity in the now famous kite experiment, and invented the lightning conductor in 1752 to save homes from the threat of lightning. The Montgolfier brothers went up in the first hot air balloon in 1783. Farmers produced better crops due to the new knowledge, and for the first time, religion faded as never before.
As these “scientific methods” became applied to everyday situations man began to resin that since man’s intellect could change farming and industry so much for the better, why could it not work for economy and religion. Never before has the human population of Europe thought about and questioned such things.
So, religion faded into two major divisions. Some went into a belief that there was no need for a “father-figure” God, to watch over his immature and evil children who wished to destroy each other, that man was a naturally good creature and despite faults, was perfectible. Others renounced God entirely and became atheists. And then there were the deists, who believed that God had created the universe and left it to run its own course. The Age of Enlightenment was a period in which people had “never argued so much about religion and practiced it so little”.
In England, John Locke decreed that every individual had rights. “What Locke had done was to declare that just as surely as Newton’s law of gravity governed the physical universe, so there existed ‘natural rights’ and laws that ruled society.” (page 107).
The Age of Enlightenment was spawned by the unquenched thirst for knowledge. This thirst presented itself in the great demand for reading material across Europe.
As French replaced Latin as the language of education, the views of the philosophes, a group of radical thinkers who exposed all that was outdated and unjust in 18th century society, were made accessible to all. Their enlightened ideas were soon being quoted in the drawing rooms of Paris and the Russian court in St. Petersburg.
The spread of knowledge was greatly helped by the publication of the Encylopedie, a collection of articles summarizing the new enlightened ideas, complied by Denis Diderot between 1751 and 1772.
Among the authors of the many articles in the Encyclopedie were Montesquieu, who believed in division between powers and not absolute monarchs, Voltaire who wished for white bread on the table and clean clothes for the peasants as was such in England, religious tolerance (although he himself was intolerant of Orthodox Christianity), and “enlightened despotism”, as he feared democracy, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who longed for all men to be equal and classless. He wrote The Social Contract, which opens with this sentence: “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau believed that man was a natural creature and was rendered un-natural by evil and corrupt governments.
The Age of Enlightenment did not only revolutionize politics, and create technology, it also manifested itself in economics.
Groups of men called physiocrats, questions the general economic belief of the 18th century, which was mercantilism. They believed that the economy was controlled by natural laws like just about everything else. They wished to free trade and lower the high tariffs and antiquated trading policies. It was at this time that Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, stating the belief in the law of supply and demand. He believed that if one country grew rich in trade, somewhere another grew poor.
The enlightened despotism of Voltaire was experimented in many different European countries, beginning after 1740. Among these were Prussia, Austria, and Russia.
In Prussia, Frederick II the Great, was the avatar of Voltaire’s ideal monarch. Frederick gave his country prosperity through various construction contracts and developing industries. He abolished torture as a means of obtaining information, and he had plans for giving children, whether rich or poor, an education, and he enforced religious toleration.
Although he had many good qualities, he would not abandon social classes, and he gave unlimited power over the peasants to the nobles. And he refused to abolish serfdom.
In Austria, Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph II, accepted the idea of enlightened despotism, and reformed the country. He abolished serfdom, and gave equal taxation to all, granted freedom of the press, and toleration for most religions.
Joseph placed many other radical reforms, including giving the state power over the church. He angered many with such drastic and enlightened reforms. Indeed, he was too advanced for his time.
In Russia, Catherine the Great “aspired to be a enlightened monarch, at least during the earlier part of her reign” (page 120-121). She put in place significant reforms, improving the government, and codifying the laws. She limited the use of torture by the courts, and introduced a greater degree of religious toleration. Catherine also founded many schools, upgraded hospital conditions, and introduced vaccination.
None of Catherine’s reforms were as great as those of Joseph II, for she still felt the need to kiss up to certain army officers and aristocrats who had helped her rise to the throne.
However, after a civil uprising in 1773, Catherine dropped the charade of being an “enlightened” despot. She began to yield a sword of repression, backed by the aristocrats and army she had kissed up to all these years.
In return for their support, she allowed the great aristocratic landowners unlimited power over their serfs, and Catherine’s reign became renown not for enlightenment, but for the strengthening of serfdom throughout Russia.
So this was the summary of the Age of Enlightenment. We now see how the foundation stone toward the education and liberation of the peoples of the world was laid during this era, and also how it was knocked down many times by those not willing to let go of the mediaeval past.
With regard to 
