Video adaptation of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, part 1 of 10.
Showing posts with label conceptual mythology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conceptual mythology. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Rejoinder
Yesterday's post was/is a temporal fleshing out of an as yet inarticulate, incomplete sense that I have (and for as long as I can remember have had, but cannot explain) toward buzz-language hype and image-intensive capital. It therefore isn't the cogent-est thing I've written. Many proponents of the concepts and movements referenced (without precedent) would argue that (1) such indicative packaging/classification is only (and, after the mid-century mark, self-admittingly, though perhaps not ironically) symptomatic, (2) the most deliberately "uncreative" and de-authorial art is at the end of the day artificial and (as an excuse) cannot be faulted for shamelessly displaying its pronounced presence upon a shelf, and that (3) we will not and never could avoid creative transmission (ambiguous term, but since we fie on expression...) through the image or object, and that abstraction/digression/conceptualization only renews the cognitive diffusion for a time before even the chance/contingent walls, floor, and spaces of context become art "objects", academicized "practices", and nouns. And can I really profess intellectual honesty, when my own blog title refers to the sporadic and informal nature of these posts?
The point is that I still cannot be satisfied (as though I should be, right?) with the attitude best described/excused, I think, in Sontag's preface to Barthes' Writing Degree Zero: "Someday perhaps a demystification of the myth of 'art' (as an absolute activity) will be possible and will take place... At this stage, only new myths can subdue—even for the brief time to permit contemplation—the old myths which move convulsively about us." And, for the moment, what to make of our myths (ours as in theirs: the avant-gardists, the conceptualists, the New Left, who itself is convincing, yet so rife)? How to parse through those that demystify, and re-mystify? What would the artistic community make of the opinion that many such delineated titles/distinctions constrain and control interests and stand in the way of objective (or solipsistically subjective) interpretation, and therefore we might do well to be rid of them? It's an unheard discussion, thus far, what with the partisan gape wrought by a politics/poetics that cannot seem to address their own anachronisms.
The point is that I still cannot be satisfied (as though I should be, right?) with the attitude best described/excused, I think, in Sontag's preface to Barthes' Writing Degree Zero: "Someday perhaps a demystification of the myth of 'art' (as an absolute activity) will be possible and will take place... At this stage, only new myths can subdue—even for the brief time to permit contemplation—the old myths which move convulsively about us." And, for the moment, what to make of our myths (ours as in theirs: the avant-gardists, the conceptualists, the New Left, who itself is convincing, yet so rife)? How to parse through those that demystify, and re-mystify? What would the artistic community make of the opinion that many such delineated titles/distinctions constrain and control interests and stand in the way of objective (or solipsistically subjective) interpretation, and therefore we might do well to be rid of them? It's an unheard discussion, thus far, what with the partisan gape wrought by a politics/poetics that cannot seem to address their own anachronisms.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Vogue (Caution: feeling unusually reactionary today)
Many of the titles reviewed by Steven Heller in this Sunday's Book Review (all related in some way to graphic design) make the "I want that!" list. What struck me enough to blurg here, though, was one of his comments on the facsimile republishing of THE FIRST SIX BOOKS OF THE ELEMENTS OF EUCLID: In Which Coloured Diagrams and Symbols Are Used Instead of Letters for the Greater Ease of Learners. Oliver Byrne's text (or graphic language, rather) employs rebus illustrations to elaborate on the concepts of Euclidean geometry with predictable 1847 primary-chrome, two-dimensional charm. Heller's comment:
"Given its 'less is more' layout and primary-color palette — red, blue, yellow, black — THE FIRST SIX BOOKS OF THE ELEMENTS OF EUCLID... prefigures the art and design of 20th-century avant-garde movements. Yet although the illustration on the title page is the spitting image of a de Stijl and Bauhaus design, the mid-19th-century publishing date disqualifies it from being 'modern' in the Museum of Modern Art sense of the word."
Far from critiquing those two radically minimalist visual art movements, the reviewer subtly refers to the peculiarly "modern" conceptual fetish for recycled content that, in a panoramic inhale, cannot be located without a hot "new" label denoting the current aesthetic fashion. (Heller also shares my obnoxious compulsion for quotation marks without specific indication of an actual source). Which leads me to an old, but as yet unsated complaint: the inundatingly prevalent 20th century habit of unnecessary (and only sometimes deserved) nomineering—sorry, seemed apt—, especially by Modern avant-gardists who by mid-century (though pre-dated, I think, by de Saussurean linguistics, but certainly by Wittgenstein) made such a stink about the imposing, capitalist ethos of NAMING, and yet were often themselves strong proponents, if not originators, of arguably undue classifications; from art coteries, to genre, to poetic practices, concepts, etc. I can appreciate Charles Bernstein's "Nude Formalism" as (I think) a satiric usage, but his own self-promoting "radical legibility" lines up right alongside other neologisms that (rather than draw attention to the thing/idea in question) stand vertically as monumental signposts of and for themselves: Concrete poetry (understood, but did George Herbert need a title to elucidate his typographical innovation?); the Objectivists (whose practices I esteem to Stein-esque heights, but who obviously knew racketeering); the Beats (and Kerouac never did hear the end of it); Language Poetry (at least not an audacious title for this disparate group of writers, though it's somehow considered distinct from the practices of Stein). I don't mean to rail against the clutter of conceptual mythologies and strikingly similar/overlapping -isms, as though they just plain bother me. If artists want to corral an audience through the capitalist marketing practice of ostentatious packaging, that's fine, so long as they recognize their complicit role in product/service pandering. But save the radical-aversion-to-capital-interests-and-the-overdetermined-object bit. It isn't parody without an object to inveigh. It's cute is what it is. Cute enough to fetishize, to sell. And I don't mean dollars, but sensibility. (The battle lines are drawn in the surrounding ethos, aren't they?). Help me out, name-manufacturers: why?
"Given its 'less is more' layout and primary-color palette — red, blue, yellow, black — THE FIRST SIX BOOKS OF THE ELEMENTS OF EUCLID... prefigures the art and design of 20th-century avant-garde movements. Yet although the illustration on the title page is the spitting image of a de Stijl and Bauhaus design, the mid-19th-century publishing date disqualifies it from being 'modern' in the Museum of Modern Art sense of the word."
Far from critiquing those two radically minimalist visual art movements, the reviewer subtly refers to the peculiarly "modern" conceptual fetish for recycled content that, in a panoramic inhale, cannot be located without a hot "new" label denoting the current aesthetic fashion. (Heller also shares my obnoxious compulsion for quotation marks without specific indication of an actual source). Which leads me to an old, but as yet unsated complaint: the inundatingly prevalent 20th century habit of unnecessary (and only sometimes deserved) nomineering—sorry, seemed apt—, especially by Modern avant-gardists who by mid-century (though pre-dated, I think, by de Saussurean linguistics, but certainly by Wittgenstein) made such a stink about the imposing, capitalist ethos of NAMING, and yet were often themselves strong proponents, if not originators, of arguably undue classifications; from art coteries, to genre, to poetic practices, concepts, etc. I can appreciate Charles Bernstein's "Nude Formalism" as (I think) a satiric usage, but his own self-promoting "radical legibility" lines up right alongside other neologisms that (rather than draw attention to the thing/idea in question) stand vertically as monumental signposts of and for themselves: Concrete poetry (understood, but did George Herbert need a title to elucidate his typographical innovation?); the Objectivists (whose practices I esteem to Stein-esque heights, but who obviously knew racketeering); the Beats (and Kerouac never did hear the end of it); Language Poetry (at least not an audacious title for this disparate group of writers, though it's somehow considered distinct from the practices of Stein). I don't mean to rail against the clutter of conceptual mythologies and strikingly similar/overlapping -isms, as though they just plain bother me. If artists want to corral an audience through the capitalist marketing practice of ostentatious packaging, that's fine, so long as they recognize their complicit role in product/service pandering. But save the radical-aversion-to-capital-interests-and-the-overdetermined-object bit. It isn't parody without an object to inveigh. It's cute is what it is. Cute enough to fetishize, to sell. And I don't mean dollars, but sensibility. (The battle lines are drawn in the surrounding ethos, aren't they?). Help me out, name-manufacturers: why?
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