"......in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. "The necessary condition for an image is sight," Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: "We photograph things on order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes."
When I read this I keep thinking about Jesse's work with the marching ants and images of soldiers at leisure in the Iraq. Jesse's video flashes edited stills of soldiers diving into swimming pools at abandon/bombed Iraqi building. I am closing my eyes and trying to remeber if the building where palaces. Its not working for me. Jesse would probably do a better job at describing this peice than I am (Maybe). But I feel it is totally revent to this conversation.
SHOW AND TELL, YEAH!!
The image below is a James Van Der Zee image "Etta Moten Barnett" which is part of the collection of a non-profit I manage. In "Camara Lucida" Barthes writes about the Van Der Zee "Family Portrait" photo (page 44,53). He originally thought that the strapped pumps that the where worn by the women in her sunday best stuck out the most. But after some thought he remebered the necklace she wore and it remind him of a necklace that was worn by one of his family members who passed away. So basically, within the photo the slender necklace reminded him of his aunt who also had a slender necklace, and she never married and died alone. MORBIDE!!!
James Van Der Zee Etta Moten Barnett, 1982 Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches, sight
When reading Camera Lucida and the account of Barthes searching for his mom's "identity" through old photographs, I began thinking about the typical family photos where people smile for the sake of smiling and gather uncomfortably bunched together. It is interesting to consider why families desire these kinds of photographs and why they want to be captured in posed and unreal kinds of moments. Do these photographs lack identity similar to the photos of Barthes mom or do they have the potential to give false impressions of a family's existence?
"A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see." p.6
"The photograph is vaguely constituted as an object, and the persons who figure there are certainly constituted as persons, but only because of their resemblance to human beings, without any special intentionality. They drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either." p. 20
"Photography is not subversive when it frightens but when it thinks." p. 38
"If I like a photograph, it is disturbs me, I linger over it." p. 99
Oh, there's so many, many more!
Because doctored photographs have been introduced...
Hey, at least these altered war images make the viewer think more about what they're seeing... In any case it seems the good times of doctored war imagery (which has always existed) and photojournalism just might be over! A Tool to Verify Digital Records, Even as Technology Shifts
"Not surprisingly many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, [Roger] Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”(despite the title, it was not across this landscape, that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge), the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture – the one that is always reproduced – he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself." Susan Sontag “Regarding the Pain of Others”
From this short bit of text, Errol Morris launched his own investigation, questioning what turned out to be no more than an assumption, borrowed by Sontag from Ulrich Keller, that the photo with the cannonballs in the road was staged. HERE
U.S. President George W. Bush (R) listens as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informs him of a second plane hitting the World Trade Center while Bush was conducting a reading seminar at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida September 11, 2001. Bush made a brief statement before leaving the school and immediately returned to Washington. (REUTERS/Win McNamee)
JIM BOURG: Photo-journalistically, it’s not a great photo. I talked to the photographer who shot it last night, and he was saying that at the time, not having any idea of the content of what was being whispered to the president, it seemed like a very inconsequential moment. And he almost didn’t take the picture as Card whispered to the president because you so often see the president’s aides whispering something to him off stage, or even on stage in a situation like that. And it didn’t seem significant at all. And yet in retrospect, it is perhaps the iconic moment of his presidency. It’s the reaction on his face as he listens to the news of the planes hitting the World Trade Center.
JIM BOURG: It’s all about the moment. There were plenty of photographers there. It’s an open press event at the White House. Any photographer with a White House pass can come and shoot the picture in the Rose Garden. So there’s a whole line of photographers and as far as I can tell, because this picture has gotten as much attention as it has, only our photographer, Kevin Lemarque, had the combination of exactly this moment and exactly this angle, which made it the most published photograph of the event and a photograph that is referred back to and published again and again many years later.
When I read Bersani's Sexuality and Aesthetics, more specifically around "... sexuality is the name given not to some hidden or profound human reality, but rather to a historical construct organized according to strategies of knowledge and power...", I thought about a very related (I think) and interesting work by Marina Abramovic and Ulay called Imponderabilia
According to their description: "Naked we stand opposite each other in the museum entrance. The public entering the museum has to turn sideways to move through the limited space between us. Everyone wanting to get past has to choose one of us."
I think it is a really powerful piece that reflects about these relationships of power the embarrassment creates (among may other thoughts).... More info: http://www.mediaartnet.org/works/imponderabilia/
Finally, another interesting piece by Vito Acconci, called Seedbed (performance piece) 1972, put the audience into the artist's fantasies by "..having a low wooden ramp merging with the floor of the gallery - it extended across the width of the room, beginning two feet up the side of one wall and slanting down to the middle of the floor. Acconci laid hidden underneath the ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating. The artist's spoken fantasies about the visitors walking above him were heard through loudspeakers in the gallery.[1]" He was masturbating at the same time.
Marina Abramovic performed the same piece in 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum.
Regarding Bower birds: Couldn't embed this clip but it's worth checking out, the original series is highly recommended, too. All clips from Life of Birds hosted by David Attenborough.
I found Quadrille quite intriguing. One thing that got me thinking was the claim that birds choose beautiful objects like flowers, fruit, and feathers based on their heredity and physiology, thus asserting that these choices are mechanical. I cant help but wonder how our aesthetic choices/values are ingrained in heredity and physiology? Why is a colorful fresh flower such an appealing phenomenon cross species?
"Valie Export's most controversial action was one of her first, Action Pants: Genital Panic (1968), during which she marched into an art-film house in Munich (not, she says now, a porno theater, as was once alleged), wearing pants with the crotch cut out.[2] Walking up and down the aisles among the mostly male patrons, she challenged them to "look at the real thing" instead of passively enjoying naked women on the screen. She extended the action to posters picturing her seated, wearing the same pants, but also sporting a machine gun. With her hair wildly teased she stares directly at the camera."
"The costume that I designed as a second body is named “Compli-mum” which means “Complete woman”. It looks like armor for women or special clothing for self-protection, but it is also trendy and sexy looking. The costume changes its own shape by separating or gathering parts of its construction through the use of microcontroller and a motorized skeleton structure. The motorized mechanism transforms the bottom area of the costume and reveals the monitors installed underneath the costume. The parts transform and enlarge the shapes to represent a sexually exaggerated and distorted female body."
Paul Sermon «Telematic Dreaming» (1992) turns a bed into the support of high-resolution images that might show a partner, intimately alive although being thousand kilometers away.
OKAY if some of you have not seen this show then some of the lil jokes may not be all that funny. (maybe?) Either way you get the idea, it's like looking in a mirror. It is like that tree that I can see right now that is trying to crimp that tree I saw yesterday!
At the beginning of Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty seems to be setting the table by arguing down a scientific approach to philosophy (I assume he is articulating the split between phenomenology, or continental schools of philosophy, and analytical philosophy as described the first week or two of class) and advocating an empirical, experiential approach to thinking as it filters into and radiates from the body, "not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine." (pg 160)
I think what he refers to as "brute meaning" is this kind of purely experiential knowledge of the world as best expressed (or "[done] so in full innocence") in art.
In James Broughton's This Is It, a young boy (a type of Adam) is discovering the world in a purely physical way while a red ball chants to him that "this is it" as if to say, "there's nothing else you need to know but what's right in front of you."
"It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings." I don't totally understand this equation. I only partially understand that Merleau-Ponty is inferring something about vision and the similarity between visible objects and the visibility (object-ness?) of the body. I think he is saying something about where the act of "seeing" takes place: is it in the object, or is it in the subject? This doesn't seem to be merely aesthetic experience, but visual experience, or perhaps even sensual experience all together.
"The enigma is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen...It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible ans sensitive for itself."
The Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson used the phrase "seeing yourself seeing" in the program notes to his show Take Your Time that recently exhibited in Dallas. He was referring to the nature of the experience he was attempting to instill in the viewer: one that draws attention to the process of seeing and experiencing. The piece which seems most exemplary of this is Room for One Color. Not only is the light one color within the room, but the type of florescent light used effectively desaturated all other color that makes its way into the room, providing a truly monochromatic experience. Whenever someone first enters the room, you will invariably hear the sound of their slow realization of this fact in the form of, "oh wow, your shirt's black and white, i mean gray, i mean yellow." And all the statements are true.
But I'm not convinced this is what Merleau-Ponty is getting at. I don't think he means this as a result of the work of art so much as the process by which the world is sublimated into the work of art. Or perhaps he means that the experience of a work of art, such as the wall paintings at Lascaux, is like seeing according to the world in that you are seeing within (or "according to") the painting's world. In this way, Eliasson creates an alternate world for us to see ourselves seeing according to.
Hopefully this is an ok start. I'll finish the rest of this tomorrow...
Thinking about Freud in relation to film reminds me of Forbidden Planet, a 50's sci-fi in which Leslie Nielson plays a brave space captain who captures the heart of a young maiden who lives on a distant planet with her father. Unfortunately, her father has repressed sexual desire for his daughter that, thanks to alien technology, manifests as an invisible monster that kills her suitors, or "The Monster From The Id". There's an essay of the same title that I can't seem to find, otherwise I would share, but applying psychoanalysis in reading Forbidden Planet is almost redundant since the film is draws heavily on Freud in it's making, however clumsily.
More specific to our discussion on Wednesday, Freud's theories of a normative sexuality that is reached by the successful culmination of a series of childhood experiences, and a multiplicity of non-normative sexualities that result from something "going wrong", are interestingly displayed and subverted in the film But I'm a Cheerleader.
So I had to focus on the Bersani texts, as the they has a bunch of resonance with my swirling thoughts around a gay bashing assault that my friends were the victims of last week.
The Bashing, Briefly:
After an event at Heaven Gallery that we threw, a number of my friends and I left for another event, leaving a fashion designer friend and his models (who participated in the event) to keep dancing and lock up when they were done. They left around midnight, and were walking down Milwaukee, which was as crowded as its been on a weekend night since it was last warm. At Evergreen and Milwaukee (about a block from the 7-11/walgreens), five young men piled out of a car and beat them up, yelling "queer," "fag," and the like. My friends fought back, and got in a couple good punches, but were outnumbered and surprised. Dozens of people were on the street around them, and stopped and stared, but did nothing else. During the assault, no one intervened, spoke up, or called the police. After the assault was over, no one approached them to see if they were alright. The police, when contacted the next day, said that they would take no action unless further attacks occurred. We have been actively working to help our friends deal with this trauma, publicize the event and help to find the assailants. The CPD Hate Crimes Division yesterday assigned two detectives to the case, security camera footage is being reviewed and interviews conducted. This is a very truncated version of the story, but I just wanted to give a context for my reactions to the Bersani texts, as I couldn't help but read them in the light of this jarring and repulsive event.
--Repetition Compulsion
I have been experiencing strong vicarious repetition compulsion urges re: the bashing, and the victims and other friends have described these feelings as well. The urge to be present during the attack, to focus your emotional distress at the idea and remembrance of the attack at the instance of a new iteration of the same event, is highly appealing. I want to be there to try to enact a new outcome.
I have personally dealt for years with a similar repetition compulsion having to do with a less intense bashing I received while an undergrad. It's uncanny how clearly it plays out in my unconscious creation of similar situations, and I've done a bunch of thinking about it since first reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle way back when... Having only really read about it via Freud, who calls everything dysfunctional neurosis, it was refreshing to get Bersani's recovery of the term. In general, Bersani's rejection of Freud's simplistic and incomplete series of value judgements re: his whole psycho-sexual schema is really interesting, if a bit unproductive in it deconstruction without reconstruction. In fact, I was really soured when, by the end of the essay he writes:
Indeed, let us frankly express our relief at having found in Freud himself (and in spite of Freud himself) convincing grounds for dismissing our own thoughts about sublimation as nothing more- and nothing less -than the play of a consciousness resolutely attached to the always ambiguous pleasures of its own vibrations.
I feel like being dismissive of the metanarrative that nourishes your entire poststructural critical career is a bit obnoxious, and we're hovering amongst a bunch of pomo canon that can't see the paradoxical irony in this tired play.. but i digress...
Anyway I really like the treatment of the repetition compulsion in Sex. and Aes. when it comes to actually getting (briefly) to the aesthetics part. His argument that art is the distancing, sublimating re-repetition of the repetition compulsion is fascinating, even if he jumps quickly over art in order to privilege criticism.. I find myself thinking of the repetition compulsion as art making practice, especially in light of Sedgwick transposing onto varying modes of critical and artistic production the Kleinian affects of paranoia and depression. If we are to be so bold as to naively map the repetition compulsion as productive practice onto Sedgwick's tautology, we can maybe come up with this simplification:
Depression: Modernism Paranoia: Post-Modernism Repetition Compulsion: Way Forward/Camp/???
Do you buy this? Do I have to sell it more?
I guess that the history of artmaking has been dependent on repetition, repetition of forms, repetition of technique, repetition of masters' technique, repetition of style throughout career. In very recent history, art-wise, I would argue, many of these tropes have fallen away. Take for example, the artist who produces the same sort of imagery, within the same medium, with the same style, for most of their adult career. Today, this seems repulsive to my generation and those on its periphery, but in, say, Jim Lutes' or Tony Fitzpatrick's generation, this was/is the status quo, as it was for time immemorial. Of course there are examples that don't follow this rule, but let's not get sidetracked and agree that this has for most of history been the general rule. OK, I've gotten sidetracked in anticipating objection... basically I'm trying to make it clear that repetition has fallen away as a trope in artmaking, and to assume that we're not alone among artistic disciplines in our condition as a hyper-differentiated/individuated collection of scattered dilettantes.
Now, in order to further de-pathologize repetition I'm going to argue that it's not some random urge that has evolved in us for no particular reason; I would like to remind us that repetition is the cornerstone of education, or, more accurately, of learning. We teach ourselves not only to draw and make good intuitive video edits by repetition, but also to shoot accurate hoops, to read, to run, to ride bikes, to have sex. Need I remind us: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. The "neurotic" patient's urge to re-create traumatic experiences is largely based in this productive habit... jump to: as an urge which might be stretched into a Kleinian affect, which might be stretched into a metaphor/method of artistic production, the repetition compulsion is interesting ground to set up new paradigm camp...
The repetition compulsion, in art, can sublimate and grant ironic distance to the rawer nerve of the repetition compulsion itself, as Bersani says, but as a practice it might look like a kind of camp, or it might look like a kind of insider art, or it might look like a dredging up of historical follies to try to recapitulate them and save them from doomedness.
Here: The dominant wisdom that provokes Freud to cast the R.C. in a negative light, and causes us to throw out our (fascist, communist, synth, beat, hippie, grunge, situationist, surrealist, modernist, idealist) babies with their bathwater, is perhaps not wise. If we were brave enough to restage the actions of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand as opposed to kicking at them with our heels because they didn't deliver the utopias they envisioned, perhaps we could recover some of the "progressive" trajectory we have so clearly lost in the past decades. We have the tools of genius at our disposal to pick up, modify, and use. Instead we thrash around with newness that uses as its referents the perverse inequity and decadence that we wallow in. I'm going to try and make old work new, which as a tactic is not new, and reeks of conservatism, but I am fed up with deconstruction and pastiche, and want to rebuild some of the structure that we're so post, and am tired of being embarrassed of putting these things so bluntly, knowing that they can be critiqued as naive by cynical folk who fancy themselves enlightened. I have intense feelings of saudade for an enlightenment that brings with it righteous positive rhetoric, and tire of generations of projects that though critique mill around in the graves of such thinkers, making sure their corpses are sufficiently scanned for faults and fractures.
But I digress again, and my critique is getting obnoxiously epistemological.
Basically, I'm above saying that I reject one method of utilizing historical art/critique tropes/themes, and I encourage another:
OK, so there's much more to talk about with the Aesthetics/Sexuality piece, but I've probably lost all of you by now, so I thought I'd skip to the next reading and throw in some bold text to catch your interest. (<-unnecessary musing) I was struck by the passages that discuss the difference between a "gay" activist existence and a mere homosexual preference. Bersani eschews the notion that gay goes along with radically liberated activist lifestyle (some even suggest homosexuality=product of liberal mindset). Bersani, while he builds to a certain heroizing of gay male promiscuity/difference in sexual activity/non-combative monogamous relationship starting, is careful to anticipate some critiques, and rails against certain heroizations of homosexuality..
On the whole, gay men are no less socially ambitious, and, more often than we like to think, no less reactionary and racist than heterosexuals. To want sex with another man is not exactly a credential for political radicalism-a fact both recognized and denied by the gay liberation movement of the late '60s and early '70s. Recognized to the extent that gay liberation, as Jeffrey Weeks has put it, proposed "a radical separation . . . between homosexuality, which was about sexual preference, and 'gayness,' which was about a subversively political way of life."' (205)
He goes on to talk of gay slumlords who feel no solidarity for other oppressed minorities, such as blacks. He makes the (I guess OK in the 80's?) weird move of equating all homosexuals with white privilege, but that's neither here nor there.
I'm reminded of this fascinating doc called flag wars about these horrible older white fags who aggressively colonize an historically black neighborhood. It's called Flag Wars:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0359281/
All of the talk of performing hyper-masculinity was also very interesting, especially as it was related to straight men, and in which ways they were and were not threatened by homosexual presence. My friends that were attacked were dressed in outfits that suggested the almost polar opposite of the will to "macho" representation. This is not to say that their outfits were hyper-feminine, though. They were clearly identifiable as fags without having to parrot gender stereotypes, in a third way that Bersani (unless I missed it) doesn't address. For B, it's leathermen with Jane Austin's oeuvre hidden in their lairs or queens who do work to demean women while highlighting (and therefor making vulnerable) their societally inflicted gender characteristics.
I feel guilty about performing . I've been weak for accepting that I "pass," and using this fact to my advantage. I feel that by making more audacious fashion choices, or even by adopting one of the various costumes of gender role-play that the queer wardrobe has acquired, I would be doing activist work in every environment I entered. Instead, for instance, I "labored under the assumption" of straightness at two of my previous workplaces, each of which was relatively queer-friendly, but housed some people who were explicitly homophobic. By "passing," as light-skinned black folk have historically done, I performed a shameful trick that was both cowardly and refused a number of opportunities to sway the minds of those who did not have direct contact with homosexual friends/coworkers/family members. I have done my share of activist work for various causes, including some queer-related ones, but I feel, especially in the recent light of my friends being gay bashed, that as a "gay," I have thus far been something of a failure. I'm confused by my options.. should I adopt a lisp, wear a pink triangle everywhere I go, or perhaps should I just join these folks:
So much more to write, but I have to finish the other readings... plus this post is way way too long already, sorry.
Lacan's Mirror Stage - Perceived wholeness in contrast with fragmented body. The identification with self as image leads to the formation of the ego and the libidinal connection with physical body image. Ego formed on misunderstanding between subject and perceived image.
Self-reflexivity in early video art as seen in Three Transistions by Peter Campus.
Laplanche: Sexual drive/instinct
"It is sexuality which represents the mode of every drive and probably constitutes the only drive in the strict sense of the term." (8)
Instinct (instinkt) leads to drive (Trieb)
Four dimensions of drive:
1. Impetus (Drang) - a building pressure (hard to separate from drive itself) 2. Aim (Ziel) - what appeases the impetus 3. Object (Objekt) - not necessarily an inanimate object or an object of knowledge, not a scientific or perceptual object but an object of the mind. Could be a person or a part of a person. Through object, drive reaches aim. Drive is independent of object, object is of minimal concern. 4. Source (Quelle) - relating to the body, stimulus, you. What relates the somatic to the psychical.
Model of sexuality compared to instincts like hunger is inaccurate. Freud points to perversions as evidence. Laplanche says because of duplicity, like how breastfeeding has two phases:
1. Nourishment 2. Sensual pleasure
In his example of breastfeeding, the sexual drive is propped upon a non-sexual, vital function.
Laplanche also describes how the sexual drive cannot be compared to hunger because we are never satiated. We seek more than we need and are never fulfilled.
"The finding of an object is the refinding of it" -Freud
"The object to be rediscovered is not the lost object, but its substitute by displacement; the lost object is the object of self-preservation, of hunger and the object one seeks to refind in sexuality is an object in relation to that of the first object." - Laplanche
The Pleasure Principle: we look at pleasure through the avoidance of unpleasure or absence of perceivable unpleasure. This gives way to conditions of stability and instability. The theories can be seen through "children's play" like Peek-a-Boo. In a twisted way, when you really think about the effects this has on children - suddenly vanishing by covering our faces, is a bit abusive to a child's psyche. We relish in the pleasure it brings when you reveal our face again and the child is naturally relieved that we reappeared and they aren't left alone. Kids go on to emulate these activities over and over, seeking the pleasure while accepting the unpleasure (having insurmountable effects on the childhood experiences, causing the ego unpleasure through the compulsion to repeat thus haunt him in adulthood, and will no doubt end up dealing with the repression via couch chats for many years). Freud concludes that this activity of repetition is a primal instinct which would seem to have bearing on repoduction.
Freud's couch
Instincts drive the need for self preservation culminating into the sexual instinct. Through repetition of this instinct stays off death, aiding in immortality. Making the Death (or the death instinct) the opposite of the Sex (or the sexual instinct).
In the "Two Figures" by Francis Bacon, it is said that "sex and death define the instability/repression he attempts to release through his expression."
"The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love." Francis Bacon
Sarah Lucas Beyond the Pleasure Principle 2000
Lucas''s bawdy humour takes a darker turn in this work. She uses a variety of household objects to produce a witty metaphor for sexual activity. However, the comic references contrast with the sobering presence of a cardboard coffin. The title refers to a seminal text by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He suggested that the drive for life is matched by an equal and opposite drive for death, so that pleasure is bound up with destruction.(From the display caption @Tate, May 2002)
How penetrating is the end of an autumn day! Ah, yes, penetrating enough to be painful even; for there are certain delicious sensations whose vagueness does not prevent them from being intense; and none more keen than the perception of the Infinite. He has a great delight who drowns his gaze in the immensity of sky and sea. Solitude, silence, the incomparable chastity of the azure a little sail trembling upon the horizon, by its very littleness and isolation imitating my irremediable existence the melodious monotone of the surge all these things thinking through me and I through them (for in the grandeur of the reverie the Ego is swiftly lost); they think, I say, but musically and picturesquely, without quibbles, without syllogisms, without deductions. These thoughts, as they arise in me or spring forth from external objects, soon become always too intense. The energy working within pleasure creates an uneasiness, a positive suffering. My nerves are too tense to give other than clamouring and dolorous vibrations. And now the profundity of the sky dismays me! its limpidity exasperates me. The insensibility of the sea, the immutability of the spectacle, revolt me. Ah, must one eternally suffer, for ever be a fugitive from Beauty? Nature, pitiless enchantress, ever-victorious rival, leave me! Tempt my desires and my pride no more. The contemplation of Beauty is a duel where the artist screams with terror before being vanquished.
After reading Benjamin's claims about how the era of reproducibility has affected the work of art, I thought about the work of the Cuban artist Félix González-Torres, who deals exactly with this issue in his projects (that are also very politicized works), in relation with the art gallery/museum "worlds".
One of his best-known works, which is related with the reproducibility of the work of art due to its form, is “Untitled (Death by Gun)". It consists of a thick stack of poster-sized white paper, each printed with the same graphic: the faces, names, ages and hometowns of 464 people who were killed by gunshots over one week — May 1 to 7, 1989 — along with a brief synopsis of the circumstances of the person’s death.
The relevant aspect (in relation to Benjamin's text), is that the viewer is invited to take and keep sheets from the stack, which is continually replenished, suggesting the continuity of gun violence.
I consider, beyond the political claims of this work and many other of his projects, it really questions the idea of the original and unique piece of art placed in an art gallery in front of an audience.
C.E.B. Reas is a new media artist how recently gave a talk at UIC. http://reas.com/ His work is abtract and inspired in natrual process and artificial life among other themes. He works with software and in his lecture he said that before arriving to a final image that is printed he goes through thousands of iterations. He builds a machine that creats endless iterations of a certain pattern and then he chooses one or two. I'm interested on how he makes this final choice, based on what? What that he sees in the final ones? The aura? But the aura of what? Why are they special? Each of the final version has hundreds with almost identical appearance. The software creates 25 potential originals per second, maybe 60 depending on the processor's speed.
While reading “Work of Art in the Age of its Tech. Reproducibility” I keep thinking back to Adorno and Kracauer. Benjimin writes about control of masses thru the use of technology. Photography and Film are tools that can be used to influence and manipulate people.
Benjimin feels that technology was developing at faster pace then the ethics that become associated with them. He states in reference to Marinetti’s manifesto(p121 he Work of Art….) “If the natural use of productive forces is impeded by the property system, then the increase in technological means, in , speed, in sources of energy will press toward an unnatural use. This is found in war the destruction caused by war furnishes proof that society was not mature enough to make technology its organ....” (p121 he Work of Art….)
All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. ie. “only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technological resources while maintaining property relations.” (p121 he Work of Art….)
At the end of the “Work of Art in the Age of its Tech. Reproducibility” Benjimin references Marinetti and Futurist. So I have linked a video and the text of the Futurist manifesto.
Futurist Manifesto
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
the place of the individual within the apparatus....
"The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily. Dealing with this apparatus also teaches them that technology will release them from their enslavement to the powers of the apparatus only when humanity's whole constitution has adapted itself to the new productive forces which the second technology has set free"
fascism and its aesthetisizing of political life and the culmination of war....
"All efforts to aesthetize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations."
So thus....Video Games + war ? allow the necessary transparency into the apparatus to involve us not only in the resolution of technologically interfacing with reality - but also continues to build on the idea of distanced communities both artificially developed within the game and also with the crew of people who spend WAY TOO MUCH time playing these games(not to judge). The ever presence of war (or other types of violence) within video games and film can also attest to his argument of the 'point of war.'
I know this week is all about the Benjamin(s) but I read the Buck-Morss and anaesthetics is on my mind. Here's an obvious reason why: I never contemplated the connection between anesthesiology and aesthetics though to look at the words next to each other makes an obvious connection. With the invention of better methods of anesthesizing the patient also came better ways to anesthesize the doctor from the situation at hand (and also the watching audience). The drugged state of the patient helped add a kind of distance or sense of removal from what would we be a horrible situation of conflicted morality (to cause pain in order to help heal). Interesting how today that distance is even greater given the anesthesiologist is a specialty in itself, the surgeon never performs their own anesthesiology.
Hospital Aura
Painting by Joseph R. Wilder, M.D.
Read the descriptionbelow: Sharp Dissection
This image captures what art critic Kuspit calls "Wilder's obsession with the demanding intimacy (far beyond ordinary colleagueship) of the operating room."
And says Koop of this series of works, "When I look at Joe's paintings, I remember and feel once again" the aura of the OR. "The way his figures stand, their body language, their very attitude propel from the page into my mind. . . . At times I used to think, 'This is as close as I will ever get to the precision of ballet dancing.'"
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
In response benjamin's claim that film is "the most serviceable vehicle of this new understanding" of art as no longer having "cult value" or use in magic, I couldn't help but think of a filmmaker who somehow did use filmmaking for these purposes that would seem to be considered obsolete.
Kenneth Anger's a particularly odd case. I think the cult value of his films was probably dependent on the reception at the time of their release, which I'm not totally aware of. I assume there were people who took his relationship to magic very seriously.
The apparatus of magic- The next dimension of the film- On pages 107 and 108 “The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily.” P. 108
Page 117 "The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus."
Nam June Paik - TV Buddha - 1974
p 117 "we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis."
As an aspiring filmmaker, I found the first Benjamin essay dealing with art in the age of reproducibility very interesting. What most stood out to me was on pg. 109 (section VIII) when he stated:
"The finished film is the exact antithesis of a work created by a single stroke. It is assembled from a very large number of images and image sequences that offer and array of choices to the editor; these images, moreover, can be improved in any desired way in the process leading from the initial take to the final cut.....The film is therefore the artwork most capable of improvement. And this capability is linked to its radical renunciation of eternal value."
As stated in my title, I am left wondering what exactly he means by film being linked to a radical renunciation of eternal value. I am guessing he is partially referring to what he mentioned earlier about art being an instrument of magic as in cave paintings as well as the Greeks producing "bronzes, tera cottas, and coins." However, can one say that film is linked to a renouncing of eternal values? I realize a film is not the same substance as a coin but can it still possess eternal values? What exactly are eternal values?
I would appreciate any comments or input from anyone...
There is a veritable Walter Benjamin industry. Conferences, special issues of journals, anthologies, monographs, the whole nine yards. (There are no fewer than three collections of essays on how to read "The Work of Art" essay in relation to digital media.) People love to parse his words, quibble about shades of meaning, and connect his (somewhat opaque) published writings to his (even more obscure) unpublished writings, including his 1000+ page unfinished Arcades Project, a collection of folios (called Konvoluts) of writing fragments, research notes, and copied-down quotations on the history of the Paris Arcades (the precursors to today's shopping malls).
That's not what I'm interested in.
Here's what I propose will help seriously in getting at Benjamin's thought, and its relevance for what we're doing here: You'll notice the essays are in numbered sections. As you read (or, once you've read), what I'd suggest is keeping a loose outline, even if you're just jotting down key terms. (I know, I know.) But seriously: understanding what each segment is about will help you track what is going on here. Enormously.
Second bit of advice: Read the footnotes, or at least look at them. The ones that are not citations are either translators' explanatory notes or Benjamin's own footnotes. These will be helpful to you in different ways, but they will both be helpful.
Also, particularly with the Artwork essay, I'd suggest thinking all the way back to the first week of the semester and Man With a Movie Camera. At points it seems like Benjamin was talking about Vertov very specifically, although nobody has been able to establish whether he'd seen the film before writing the essay. (See what I mean about the Benjamin industry? People do this stuff for a living...)
See you tomorrow, after our hiaitus. I hope crits were productive (and not too abusive) for those of you who had them.
I could fill up a blog with incidents of the reproduction, reenactment and post-production related to popular videos on the Internet. In the case of David After the Dentist, the original video is of a boy who is clearly still high on N2O, talking to an adult in the front seat of a car. Something in the humor of the dialogue sparked, very quickly, multiple re-enactments and post-produced YouTube videos, in some cases combining the dentist video with other Internet popular videos (e.g. Chad Vader). I am posting these in relation to an argument I recently had about whether ""The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" is a vital work for Introduction to Time-Based Art. From my perspective, it is not as it has been surpassed by other, more contemporary works. This is not to say that it is not of vital historical importance. I would suggest, however, that both Guy Debord's "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle" and Nicholas Bourriaud's "Post-Production" would be more useful and more relevant to understanding and using reproduction in contemporary art practice.
Coming across the idea of an artwork's aura, I immediately thought of spirit photography, which is embedded into the history of photography (For more reading see: The Perfect Medium; Photography and the Occult). It is interesting to see a contemporary artist continue this tradition.
Freud really started out in a good direction when he talked about the importance of the unconscious mind to understand conscious thought and behavior. When I read this, Tolle's teachings came to mind - the whole of humanity is trapped in self-created worlds of thought. Unfortunately, Freud replaced this concept with the Ego, Super-Ego and the Id - proposing that the psyche could be divided into three parts. Whereas Tolle went on to develop the idea that the source for all conflict is within the human ego. He continues, the 'escape' from this ongoing prison is a direct experience of the sublime, the infinite - that which stands outside, before and beyond the categorizations and divisions of conceptual thought.
Posts
