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| Uncanny/Unwoven
Notes towards a New Conceptual Art by Paul D. Miller |
| The guard on dutysees
all visitiors except The beads of spring dew. ------Richard Wright, Haiku from "This Other World" |
Transmission engaged, code signal uploaded, cliche remix status open... I sit here in my room and write. This essay is a circular reflection, a mirror of my mind as I sit here and think, watching my thoughts unfold. If you're looking for a smooth clean linear analysis of the condition of art and its engagement with the real, look someplace else. That issue was old news a long time ago. This essay will celebrate hybridity. This essay will engage radically different perspectives on the reality we all live in. Art and environment? Self as suture? Holding the the warp and weave of the fabric of the world together is a difficult task when the threads are all from different cuts of cloth. Trying to grasp the density of the current moment creates a series of disjunctions that make themselves apparent to anyone concerned with the arts in the late 20th century. Trying to describe the density leaves a blank spot in my mind. "Ceci n'est pas un Pipe" Magritte told us so long ago. I sit here on the verge of writing and ponder the situation he conveyed. The words summoned up by the word "real" - the meanings, connotations, hypertextual linkages and confluences of the space it occupies in our culture flow through my mind like so much water between a pair of cupped hands. Prosthetic Realism. Proxemic Agency. Frozen Time. Degrees of Amnesia: late 20th Century conceptual realism? A list of names, some relevant as core sources, some as contexual agents: (fill in the blanks)... A series of tenuous observations... A list of associative images, some that offer a conceptual backdrop, others that become relevant only if they are viewed both as precedents and antecedents. Visual ecology, I think, is the common denominator linking all these blank spaces, names that I have witheld. Spaces left open for further examination. Names at the edge of thought. Just beyond recall. Particles of meaning, waves of thought, blurred immediate recall.Visual recoil. The elements of the work reduced to a placid feeling of surveillance - anyxiety in the camera, ennui in the observer. Your eyes, absent minded, looking out. These things I leave open, with a hint of why they are referenced... Situation/Signification--- Sometimes imagery, whether it is presented on canvas or seen as a series of repeated stills (tv, Cd-Roms, movies, etc.), has a way of evoking what some theorists like to call a "kinedramatic" imaginal response. Sometimes they leave a blank space that memory later gives meaning to. Somtimes they have an immediate, visceral effect. Angles of incidence leave paths of thought unresolved, a high resolution photo frame-capture, still life, "nature-morte." What is the point? Once again, we are presented with a series of images. Looking out my window, I sit here and observe a geography of nowhere paint itself across my eyes. Planes glide by, my fax machine nearby murmurs a continuous feed of paper, my computer glows in a knowing way and blinks before it goes into screen saver mode. I sit and feel the spectres of invisible presences flow through me. The codes coming back, coming inside... Whether it's the satellite transmissions beaming through my body at any given moment, or the skypage calls that seem to cloud my thoughts with dispersed messages that I'll never retrieve, 1999 for me, was the year of realizing that reality as the generation that preceeded mine knows it, is completely over. Call it total media saturation, prosthetic realism, "the electromagnetic imaginary," or whatever you so desire, but the social construct of a basic sense of concrete reality - viewed by me and the generation to which I belong (a kind of tenuous held group of shared values as reality at best), is now relegated to a consensual hallucination that has taken hold of the very roots of our global tele-mediated culture. "I tell a tale of bodies that change" Ovid told us a couple thousand years ago in his "Metamorphosis," that classic archetypal tale of Greek culture and the Western culture that followed in its footsteps. We've come so far from the reality that Ovid described that it almost seems like a migration has occurred from myth to code. Today, this electro-modern reality that we inhabit, this proscenium of presence and absence, is a pantomime dance for the data depleted reservists of what used to be called "the real" - or maybe its just the words of someone too exhausted to deal with the paradigm shift that seems to have occurred in the media world. The world as a vast skipping record? Well, a rhyme of sorts emerges from the thought-process: from now to the beginning, let it be like a recod spinning. Rites of passage... a poetics of presence haunted by the after image of selection - choice of reals in the real - trans-modernity: an image of a consumer flitting in and out of the virtual shadows of a mausoleum of objects arouses other phantasmal memories. Who is dreaming who, and who is selling tickets to the show? Suspense of closure, suspense of disbelief. Like an electric current, alternating and direct, world without end, that is the thought I send... From now to the beginning, let it be like a record spinning: the songs play a tune we all know, but that seems to be in search of a player. The phantom dance continues while the needle carves a new tune into the flesh of the grooves... Marshall Mcluhan and Wilfred Watson said a long time ago in their infamous book "From Cliche to Archetype" that "in the age of electronic technology, the age of the zero gradient, the sacred or divine city of the ancient and native cultures is given archetypal status. In the environment created by electric circuitry, the entire world takes on again the dimension of a "divine animal." All the fragmentation of the Neolithic technologies begins to appear to be a fairly clear cut case of nostalgic archetypalizing, characteristic of all Utopias..." From a logic of dispersion - the new gathering spaces, the new cathedrals, the museum and galleries of the phantasmal, virtual crafts that we use to extend our sense of tele-presence - an old voice emerges singing a new song, a poetry of what cultural theorist Erik Davis calls "the electromagnetic imaginary," and what I call "prosthetic realism." In the movement from Utopia to Heterotopia, the one in the many, the many in the one, we find ourselves caught in a complex web of visual and psychological cues, a form of kinesthethesia pervades everything we do. It's a phenomenon that science fiction writer J.G. Ballard liked to call "an arraignment of the finite," that acts as an uncanny cipher regulating the traffic of plural meanings that bombard us at every moment - for him it is a realm that science fiction and art find themselves in collision at the cross-roads of contemporary culture. "Above all, science fiction is likely to be the only form of literature which will cross the gap between the dying narrative fiction of the present and the cassette and videotape fictions of the near future1" Ballard wrote in 1971. He could just as easily have been talking about art. Art and the imagination - the physical and the mental - linked like the first installment of a loan made from the future. Payment is due. Prosthetic realism - a mirror of the mind as its expression unfolds in time [I break it down with a rhyme]: From now to the beginning, let it be like a record spinning/ a poetics of presence/contents under pressure/got caught in an electromagnetic lecture.... like William Carlos Williams observed a long time ago, "poetrty is nothing but a machine made of words." The task of art now is to somehow speak of this plurality of "reals" in a world moving into a polyphrenic cultural space: the Greek agora, the city center, the museum - all these places of social mutuality - all find themselves adrift. Art is our guide to the new terrains we have, in pursuit of techne and logos, opened within ourselves. Encoding. It's a strange word to use at the beginning of an essay on sampling and repetition, but there it is. What comes to mind when you say the word? Whether it's written or spoken, several meanings come to mind and in turn lead you down other paths of meaning - no fixed points come into perspective, no key opens the cryptographic realms of the word to penetration. One simply uses the word to refer to a process2. Encoding. The word evokes systems of thought, procedures of extrapolation, syntax and stucture, and most of all it evokes a sense of movement and actions taken in a realm of correspondences - of translating one form of code into another. Interpenetration of one form into another mirrors the classic sense of binary movment that writers of semiotic philosophy and literature have been concerned with for several centuries now. Double movement, binary stratification, transience of meaning - all point to a strange game in which absence and presence, form and function, sign and signified, play in an ever shifting field of meaning, a place where text and textuality switch place with blinding speed. The double. Whether it was Giordano Bruno writing back in the [tk] century, Hegel with his decree of the end of art written during a time of aesthetic flux in the 19thC or Ferdinand de Saussure writing later in the 19th, and even later, Noam Chomsky with his ideas of generative syntax and performative structure in language, Freud with his explicit psychological explorations of psychological projection and displacement, Derrida with his concepts of linguistic play and textuality, or Barthes with his idea of jouissance, and later Jameson, Guattari and Deleuze: one common feature in the disparate thoughts of these radically different thinkers and the ideas they have had: In the movement from sign to signified, the translation process of language becomes a field of representation from which many meanings are created, and the resonance of those meanings takes shape in some form of linguistic play in literature. It does seem like a big jump to pull such different people together under the sign of play, but then again, that's what mixing is about: creating seamless interpolations between objects of thought to fabricate a zone of representation in which the interplay of the one and the many, the original and its double - all these things come under question. From Plato's myth of the cave-shadows to todays frequency drenched landscape of electro-modernity, in the electronically accelerated environment we call home a turbulent cloud of paradoxical meanings arises whenever the notion of consensus is engaged. Today we live in a society defined - in many senses, and by almost all the connotations associated with the word as well - by the word "current." Alternating or direct, descriptions of transcience and modality, in a menagerie of representations brought to us by the physics of a world governed by the movement of electrons - in this strange binary world of fiber optics, digital information technologies, and global economics, a logic of alterity is at play. The old hierarchies of linear thought, sublime (and sublimated!) engagements with art, etc etc all of these systems of thought are no longer needed to do the ideological work now conducted again along the lines of "current" through all-inclusive data networks that transform individual creation into interchangeable parts, Lego building blocks of consciousness in a world that moves under the sign of continuous transformation and atomized perspectives of what I to call "electro-modernity." "Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power," Joseph Beuys tells us. "Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART....3" One thing that the thinkers I have listed above have never engaged fully is the role that the machinery of culture acts out in the theater of the mind - and how we navigate through the abstract realms of the systems we use to maintain meaning in the transitory spaces that we create to act out the roles we have assigned one another. It's all, as we say in the dj world, "in the mix." What is the common denominator that holds all these people together? Perhaps, simply put, this essay, this piece of paper you hold in your hands, and the ideas it generates in your mind. All other considerations are conceptual engagements, paths of flight through densely layered and intensely cross-referenced thoughts with no beginning and no end save where I put the last mark on the page, the last comma and "period" demarcating the end of the written text. The rest of the action takes place in your mind. "The fact is," Lewis Mumford wrote in his manifesto for a new kind of art in his book "Art and Technics," "...in every department of art and thought we are being overwhelmed by our symbol-creating capacity; and our very facility with the mechanical means of multi-folding and reproduction has been responsible for a progressive failure in selectivity and therefore in the power of assimilation...between ourselvs and the actual experience and the actual environment there now swells an ever rising flood of images which come to us in every sort of medium... as the result of this whole mechanical process we cease to live in the multi-dimensional world of reality...we have substituted for this, largely through mass production of graphic symbols - abetted indeed by a similar multiplication and reproduction of sounds - a secondhand world, a ghost world, in which everyone lives a secondhand and derivative life. The Greeks had a name for this pallid simulacrum of real existence: they called it Hades, and this kingdom of shadows seems to be the ultimate destination of our mechanistic and mammonistic culture.4" The 20th century has been a place where art has come under serious pressure to evolve away from the systems that gave it substenance in the middle ages and early phases of industrial culture: in a sense most of the kinds of art that flourisuhed during those time periods and were held in esteem by the patrons of those eras could almost be said to be unsustainable in contemporary life - the role and function of art as the past engaged it, during our century of extreme flux, has changed and migrated into new realms of representation. The "real" that we knew from the perspective paintings of the Renaissance, the sacred objects of formal patron system art, the "sublime" of Kant and Burke and Longinus refracts off of Barnett Newmans infamous claim to transcience: "the sublime is now!" Ideas invoked by these systems of thought - all seem to have been absorbed by the place in culture that has come to be called "mass" and in a way, their functions have spread out and resurfaced in a radically different context of interlocked networked electronicized systems, geographically dispersed cultures of digital exchange, and a sense of velocity - things just move more rapidly than ever before in human history. If the artist is an interpreter and, indeed, originator of the signs of culture then there needs to be some exploration of the phenomenon of decentralization and dispersion that we are living in and under in contemporary culture, a place immersed in what I like to call "electro-modernity." If we move from Mumford's rather harsh indictment of 20th century mechanistic culture and its engagement with the arts to another viewpoint based in the 19th century of Hegel, we find a similar indictment of art and culture. In 1828 Hegel wrote a kind of post-mortem analysis of the kind of art that he felt had been the end product of a Golden Age of European art. "Considered in its highest vocation," he expounded, "art... is and remains for us a thing of the past." The terms with which we view and experience art as through the filter of all the different aesthetic principles of the different "Sublime" experiences and aesthetic connundrums of the different philosophers of the ages, for Hegel, had somehow dispersed in a world moving rapidly into a milieu of complete mechanization of the artistic process. A century or so later, Mumford's words echo a similar sentiment. One has to wonder - what is a beginning and what is an end? Hegel felt that a twilight had descended on the aesthetic principles of European art and it was science that had somehow displaced the principles that had, for so many years, driven the artistic impulse in European art. "Neither in content nor in form is art the highest and absolute mode of bringing to our minds the true interests of the spirit...the peculiar nature of artistic production and of works of art no longer fills our highest need...it is certainly the case that art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it and found in it alone, a satisfaction that, at least on the part of religion, was most intimately linked with art. The beautiful days of Greek art, like the golden days of the later Middle Ages, are gone."5 For both Hegel and Mumford art was a dialectical engagement with the external world and its ability to invoke emotion and intellectual responses in the viewer. In a sense, there's a double movement from outside/inside to cause/effect in both of these radically different thinkers. But there are other ways to apply their observations to a contemporary world riddled with perceptual paradoxes and the deeply referential mimetic qualities of identity. In a century informed as much by Duchamp and the critique of the found object that his work represented as by the constant appropriation of non-European values into core aspects of the artististic process in the Industrialized West, there have been many changes in what could even be considered art in the context that both Hegel and Mumford were writing about. In his 1966 installation entitled "Working Drawings and Other Visible Things Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed As Art," the artist Mel Bochner created what is considered by many to be the first exhibition of Conceptual Art. In his installation Bochner took elements from the everyday and recontextualized them in the gallery context: graphic spreadsheets of mathematical analysis, business reports, diagrams from radically different fields of human endeavor such as calculus, algebra, accounting, etc etc. All found themselves neatly enfolded onto four binders put on pedestals. Needless to say the textual engagement with the objects under consideration underwent a strange transformation in which context became the all pervasive motif, and the sense that the "objects" were a kind of generative syntax for other, radically different interpretations of their "use value." There was a strange sense of, for lack of a better word "un-cathexis" in Bochner's work. The material in binders on the pedestals meant only as much as the viewer brought with them - the baggage of their interprative abilities was based on their knowledge of the material at hand and the context in which they found themselves. Could it be, that in a silent way, Bochner referenced the Hegelian screed that I pointed out at the beginning of the essay, and in one fell swoop, created artwork that embodied Mumford's fear of a world of cross-referenced double meanings, a world of Derridean textuality where the double (and all the Freudian concepts attendant to the idea of the double) becomes the foundation for art and the way we experience its textuality. There are many parallels to this kind of interpretive/analytic process of questioning to the point of textual atomization. Plato's myth of the cave, the Hindu concept of samsara, and in a more contemporary mode, the notion of "virtual reality": all of these aesthetic movements place perception whether in sound or symbol in a place where meaning is a highly contested space in culture where, unlike the "fixed" forms of the past that were enforced by religion and social codes - it becomes a floating signifier, a reference point that is in-itself a collection of other reference points. All of these historic precedents focus on a reality of aesthetic and philosophical impulses that are somehow held together by an underlying structure that holds "truth" and "meaning" to be a kind of transcendent quality. "Sublime attributes stimulate esteem, but beautiful ones, love6," Kant wrote a long time ago in his "Observations onThe Beautiful and the Sublime." But in this strange world of mimetic reality and displaced manufactured entertainment where vicarious experience and what I like to call "franchise identity" hold sway, who is dreaming who, how are the connections made, and who's selling tickets to the show? What do love and terror, beauty and reflection have to do with a where governed by relativistic speeds and information theory? The "real" in art and culture - the "sublime" as Kant and Burke tended to express it -is something that is held above the everyday, and the symbols we use to represent culture and our place in nature are put in a binary opposition to the eidetic qualities of a consensual "real" based on human interaction. Sound, memory, thought, perception - all of these act as a replication function in an aesthetic world governed by rules and regulations, a kind of forced and en-forced system of representation: the real and it's double re-presentation a la Mumford, is a binary relationship whose evolutionary dynamic from aesthetic principle to reality principle has been a powerful trope in almost all 20th century art. Interiority and transcendence in an age of coroporate logos, mass production and cybernetic replication. What role does art have in a world where as Hal Foster wrote so long ago "generally, mass culture abstracts a specific content (or signified) into a general form (or signifier): a social expression is first reduced, then mediated as a "popular" style.7" But if we compare this notion of styles and systems, we are lead back to one of the original precepts that underpins 20th C thought: cybernetics. "Our tissues change as we live," Norbert Wiener, the principle creator along with information theorist Claude Shannon, of our century's engagement with systems of information and control. "The food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.8" So from the binary oppositions of the past, we are now led into a world of permanent flux and continuous change, patterns within patterns folded in on one another as a basic way of engaging the multi-verse - man made and natural -the boundary between the two seens to have been suspended around ourselves with the tools of both art and science. Mass culture is a place where people live vicariously though the signs and symbols generated by the social environment that surrounds and moves through them. It's a strange eco-system balanced just as much by human dreams as by the machines we use to create and distribute them. Documentation can be a dangerous thing. What I'm pointing out is a kind of abstraction of human essence into the machine process - a place where identity acts as a distributed network of double representations, and mass culture becomes the crucible for the paradoxes of the singular and the plural, the original and its double. For W.E.B. Dubois writing at the turn of this century, identity for the African-American was implicitly one of doubling, of living in a world defined by racial characteristics that were abstracted on a general level, and that, in this sense, became the reference point for almost all individual identity. Mass culture for him was a place riddled with the paradox of the double - and in this way he preceded much of the discourse around individuality and identity that later psychologists like Freud (with his concept of "the Uncanny," an idea that I explore later in this essay) and Sherry Turkle and the existential movements in philosophy of Sartre and De Beauvoir that later spoke in general terms when relating people to the objects that surround them - and that they live through. "Born with a veil, and gifted with a second sight in this American world," Dubois wrote of the African American condition, we are faced with "a world which yields... no true self consciousness, but only lets [us] see [ourselves] through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others...one ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder9." Where Dubois felt a system of dual identity become part of the basic fabric of his definition of self, many years later, we live in a time where most information we get about everything from the news to how much we have spent on our credit cards each month, comes from the data that surrounds and moves through the systems of representation we have surrounded ourselves, and indeed, defined ourselves by. The double has come home to roost, and it is not original. It is a remix: in the world of digital information, have we all become the psychological equivalent of the African-American condition that Dubois wrote of? The sense of "doubleness" lurks strangely on the horizon of 20th century writing, and sometimes, what has come to be called "binary logic" or a "logic of alterity" seems to be one of the major tropes of 20th C life. There are other parallels to the mix that Dubois summoned up, and many of them have to do with the sense of psychological projection that he described in his classic "The Souls of Black Folk." But I'd like to posit that the sense of displacement that Dubois so lyrically summoned up in his critique of the American situation, has found other resonances in the hyper-mediated world we inhabit. Art, sculpture, writing, almost all human creation, it seems to me, in our late 20th century electronically accelerated and media saturated world, come to us through the symbol systems that, as I pointed out abve, Mumford and Hegel were speaking of long ago. Freud's take on the condition is one that he called, in a relatively prescient way, "the uncanny:" "After having considered the manifest motivation for the figure of a "double," we have to admit that none of this helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and in our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that nothingin this more superficial material could account for the urge towards defence which has caused the ego to project that material outward as something foreign to itself. When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the "double" being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted - a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The "double" has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons... if we take another class of things, it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of "chance...10" It's kind of amazing how the sense of theater, repetition, and a sense of personal displacement that Freud was talking about when he explored the psychology of the double parallels the later explorations of Dubois's conception of "double consciousness." But, to me, the extent to which people are always immersed in a third set of conditions - the psycological machinery of the projection - that allows for a kind of triple consciousness. Self in a menagerie of reflections, a mime dance of presence and absence, minds within minds, reflections within reflections: the 20th C has bequeathed to the creative mind a panoply of identities and created a space in culture where most previous generations of artists and people involved with the arts, would have only had recourse to theater. In his 1938 manifesto and collection of essays, "The Theater and Its Double," on the mediated quality of life in the West that inessence was a condemnation of the banality of life in an Occident where magic and a sense of transcendent awareness is remote from a bleak quotidian world of normalcy Antonin Artaud wrote "and if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.11" Though Artaud was writing back in 1938, much of his ideas of theater as manipulation of symbolic actions - "la realite virtuelle" - and encoded gestures has a resonance with todays contemporary reality of digital creativity. Artaud later in his book wrote, "where alchemy, through its symbols, is the spiritual Double of an operation which functions only on the level of real matter, the theater must also be considered as the Double, not of this direct, everyday reality of which it is gradually being reduced to a mere inert replica...but of another archetypal and dangerous reality...for this reality is not human but inhuman, and man with his customs and his character counts for very little in it...all that was *representative*, i.e. theatrical, in the whole series of *symbols*...in the almost "dialectical" sequence of all the aberrations, phantasms, mirages, and hallucinations which those who attempt to perform these operations *by purely human means* cannot fail to encounter... all true alchemists know that the alchemical symbol is a mirage as the theater is a mirage. And this perpetual allusion to the materials and th principle of the theater found in almost all alchemical books should be understood as the expression of an identity... existing between the world in which the characters, objects, images, and in a general way all that constitutes the *virtual reality* of the theater develops, and the purely fictitious and illusory world in which the symbols of alchemy are evolved.12" In the passage above, Artaud established himself as the first person to use the word "la realite virtuelle" - one must remember that it was in the context of theater, object/subject relations, and their expression in a "dialectical" sequence of phantasmal representations. In short, Artaud anticipates todays contemporary digital culture by a long shot. Current. Electricity Movement. Textuality. "The word *electricity* entered the English tongue in a 1650 translation of a treatise on the healing properties of magnets by Jan Baptist Van Helmont a Flemish physician and Rosicrucian13..." Erik Davis tells us in his book "Techgnosis," in the middle of an exposition on what he calls the "electromagnetic imaginary." Mirroring Artaud's concept of theater and symbolic interaction as a kind of "virtual craft," Davis forges an alchemical milieu in the middle of what many people consider to be the scientific domains of an electronic art that is a kind of fusion between techology and the human: "virtual reality was not hatched in the hopped-up halls of Silicon Valley," he tells us. We've come a long way since 1938 when Artaud used the phrase in his essay, and in many ways, when we add electric current to the heady mix that he describes, we have to realize that the true arena for the unfolding of almost all of these different aspects of human creativity have become a kind of *gesamtkunstwerk* - a total theater in which art and science, technology and the creative impulses driving them all, have become part of the everyday reality we find ourselves immersed in, prosthetically tied to the images we have carried with us from time immemorial. When viewed in this light, the possibilities of artistic creation seem to involute and fold in on themselves, to become, as it were, a kind of dance between the self/subject, and the "original" and the myriad reflections of self as other, an unknown object of affection floating on the edge of perception, reflecting back at us like some virtual Troy, a city of layers and geological time, summoned up and displaced by the keystrokes and electric currents we, multiplied, inhabit, and that we see reflected back at us in the multiplying mirror of memory. "In other words, I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two," Mingus wrote at the beginning of his classic "Beneath the Underdog." He goes on to later say: "The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there's an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes that what's been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can't - he goes back inside himself." Like I said in some of my earlier posts, it's always amazing how much music paralles the developments of other mediums - and in a way, anticipates them. Mingus shows us a third path and, in a sense, after seeing the dialog around how much people need "franchise identity" to modulate their perceptions of themselves i.e. why we seem to have this extreme need to discuss ourselves through the fixtures of actors and movies, books, and other stories, perhaps points to a realm that Richard Wright wrote of in his poem - reconstruction beginning where the out side ends, innerspace as a way of mediating outerspace. Here's Wright's poem again - check it out in this context: Current: it's the root word/description of electricity. Flow. Alternating or direct, it moves through almost everything we're doing at the moment, and leaves us open to the spectral space of the decoded surfaces of a culture of saturation. Just a thought as I begin my day. I think back to the argument between Keats and Newton. Keats felt that the scientific investigations of Newton had destroyed the sense of wonder that the natural world he inhabited created in the human mind. Newton, by decoding natural light through the use of a prism into its component elements, had created a new way of seeing the environment around us, and Keats echoes so many people today when he wrote of the mysteries of art and science, poetry and passion, art and its interface with it's environment. For Keats, the decoding of light spelled the end of natural wonder, and he took up the theme in several of his poems. But the strange thing about this poem, the uncanny echo reverberating though his thoughts - is the unweaving of his own flight from the new magics of a world of science which would make almost all previous wonders seem paltry. We have inherited the world he, and Hegel and Mumford feared so much, but his poetry speaks to the demise of the past that we have, perhaps uncosciously, shed: Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine - Unweave a rainbow, as it were erstwhile made The tender-personed.... melt into a shade.14Again, here's the haiku Richard Wright wrote a long time ago, and it, too, is about flow: The guard on dutysees all visitiors except The beads of spring dew.Engineer and poet, scientist and artist - from Keats to Newton, From Emerson to Edison, from Wright to Artaud, from real to imaginary - the connections linking them unfold and weave a web of intrigue, a Borghesian library where all information flows together, comes apart, becomes componential - becomes trans-modern. This is what Derrida called Difference. Remix this sentence: [Kinesthetics is the word often used to convey how people relate to the objects around them] - they way they move through an environment of relative velocities and trajectories of movement. But what happens when the environment becomes invisible and the way we move becomes configured not by what we can see but how we feel in relation to the presence of the intangible. Physical feedback - kinesthetic consciousness, proxemic agency. Music has often led the way in this dialog of two-fold thought. From Dubois double consciousness to Mingus's triple consciousness and then to Garrett A. Morgan the inventor of the traffic lights system, and then to conceptual art and environmental sculpture and social sculpture: repetition and Warhol, repetition and the sense of art as trance, a place where old and new mix in the virtual spaces of the imagination, a new sublime, that, paradoxically, is incredibly old. From the doubled faces peering out from Picasso and Braque's paintings at the beginning of the century, to the Italian Futurist's engagement with speed and denisity, on up to the extreme visual repetition of Warhol and Vasarely, to the fractured music of jazz and hip-hop, the 20th century has been a realm of disappearance and re-inscription, an electro-magnetic dance between the real and unreal - a place where presence and absence become two signfiers of a condition of dispersed identity. Soniture/ecriture - combined with a critique of object as stable unitary reference point, the creative act now becomes part of a system of relational/referential meanings - adrift in an ocean of mediated signs and images, the imagination creates by association, the realm that Breton spoke of so long ago when he said "vous n'avez pas lu jazz!," (you haven't read jazz!), a phrase that became the Surrealist's motto as they explored the realms of the unconscious and its interaction with the world of media that they found themselves immersed in during the early portions of this century. They simply called the phenomenon "automatic writing." Derridean difference and its re-engagement with textuality as the musical parallels to a world circumscribed by what thinker Mcluhan used to call the "Gutenberg Galaxy" take us to a place where all is flux - the boundaries between the different mediums have long ago faded. Sound and sentiment, symbol and signified - all that is old news, flotsam and jetsam floating in the strange continuum Tesla and Marconi created long ago when they matched electricty with radio waves and lead to a continuum of what Davis calls "the electromagnetic imaginary." One can only wonder what the 21st century holds in store for the thing we call "Art." The future in that light, seems utterly boundless. Or as Phillis Wheatley, one of the first African Americans to write a book, and who was named after the ship that brought to this strange country where identity was erased and left as an open ended variable to be used as a palimpsest, said long ago in one of her rare poems. I sit and look out my window from the top floor of my lair, 226 years and the theme of the ocean makes me hear waves in the NYC nite air...Oceanby Phillis WheatleyHow muse divine, thy heavenly aid impart,The feast of Genius, and the play of Art.From high Parnassus' radiant top repair,Celestial Nine! Propitious to my prayer.In vain my eyes explore the watery reignBy you unaided with the flowing strain.When first old Chaos of tyrannic SoulWav'd his dread Sceptre o'er the boundless whole,Confusion reign'd til the divine CommandOn fleeting azure fix'd the solid Land.Till first he call'd the latent seeds of light.And gave dominion o'er eternal Night.From deepest glooms he rais'd this ample Ball,And round its walls he bade the Surges roll,With instant haste the new made Seas complyd.And the globe rolls impervious to the Tide:Yet when the might Sire of the Ocean frownd"This awful trident shook the Solid Ground."The Kings of Tempest thunders o'er the plain,And horns the azure monarch of the main,He sweeps thy surface, makes they billows rare,And furious, lash the loud resounding Shore.His pinion'd rare his dread commands obey,Ly----,----, Boreas, drive the foaming Sea!See the whole stormy progeny descend!But cease -----, all thy winds restrain,And let us view the wonders of the mainWhere the proud Courser paws the blue abodeImpetuous bounds, and mocks the driver's rodThere, too, the Heifer fair as that which boreDivine Europa to the Cretan shoreWith guiless mian thy gentle Creature straysQuaffs the pure stream, and crops ambrosial grassAgain with recent wonder I surveyThe finny sov'reign bask in hideous play(So fancy sees) he makes a tempest riseAnd intercept the azure vaulted skiesSuch is his sport: but if his anger glowWhat kindling vengeance boils the deeps below!Twas but o'er now and Eagle young and gayPursu'd his passage thro' the aierial wayHe aim'd his piece would C----f's had to moreYes he brought to pluto's dreary shoreSlow breathed his last, the painful minutes movePerhaps his father's just commands he boreTo fix dominion on some distant shoreAh! me unblest he cries Oh! Had I staidBut ah! too late. - Old Ocean heard his criesHe strokes his hoary tresses and repliesWhat mean these plaints so near to our watrythrone?And what the Cause of this distressful moan?Confess Iscarious, let thy words be trueNor let me find a faithless Bird in youThe voice struck terror thro' the whole domainAnd by his frowns the royal youth began,Saw you not Sire, a tall and Galiant ShipWhich proudly scum the Surface of the deepWith pompous form from Boston's port she cameO'er the rough surge the dauntless Chief prevailsHis fatal musket shortens this my dayAnd thus the victor takes my life awayFain with his wound Iscarious said no moreHis spirit sought Oblivion's sable shore.This Neptune saw, and with a hollow groan,Resum'd the azure honours of his Throne.... The truth of Wheatley's poem? The reality of the images her words summon? Mime dances, rituals of repetition, and so on and so on. The truth? The real.... to end with a quote, another reflection of the circularity of meanings summoned up in the mesh of sound, symbol and sentiment... or as Derrida said at the conclusion of his "The Truth in Painting"-Be careful...what is a motif? ....If not something like the iron shadow of the motet of an unutterable antique music, like the leitmotiv of a theme despairing of its own subject...[the real] - You don't have to render anything. Just bet on the trap as others swear on the Bible. There will have been something to bet. It gives to be rendered. To be put back on/put off.-It's just gone.-It's coming round again.-It's just gone again....15"or as Marshall Mcluhan and Wilfred Watson wrote in their classic "From Cliche to Archetype," in a section called "Art as Lie:" "Today the multimedia have, as noted, demobilized consciousness. We speak of a lie as "credibility gap." "Truth" once again becomes "trust," not Cartesian certainty.16" ...Derridean difference and its re-engagement with textuality as the musical parallels to a world circumscribed by what thinker Mcluhan used to call the "Gutenberg Galaxy" take us to a place where all is flux - the boundaries between the different mediums have long ago faded. Sound and sentiment, symbol and signified - all that is old news, flotsam and jetsam floating in the strange continuum Tesla and Marconi created long ago when they matched electricty with radio waves and lead to a continuum of what Davis calls "the electromagnetic imaginary." One can only wonder what the 21st century holds in store for the thing we call "Art." The future in that light, seems utterly boundless. Or as Phillis Wheatley, one of the first African Americans to write a book, and who was named after the ship that brought to this strange country where identity was erased and left as an open ended variable to be used as a palimpsest, said long ago in one of her rare poems.... but wait. I sit and look out my window from the top floor of my lair, 226 years and the theme of the ocean makes me hear waves in the NYC nite air... The poem floats on the screen, the words of its composition adfrit in a space that is oceanic, but definitely not an ocean... Prosthetic Realism. Proxemic Agency. Frozen Time. Degrees of Amnesia: late 20th Century conceptual realism? A list of names, some relevant as core sources, some as contexual agents: (fill in the blanks)... A series of tenuous observations... A list of associative images, some that offer a conceptual backdrop, others that become relevant only if they are viewed both as precedents and antecedents. Visual ecology, I think, is the common denominator linking all these blank spaces, names that I have witheld. Spaces left open for further examination. Names at the edge of thought just beyond recall. Particles of meaning, waves of thought, blurred immediate recall.Visual recoil. The elements of the work reduced to a placid feeling of surveillance - anyxiety in the camera, ennui in the observer. Your eyes, absent minded, looking out. These things I leave open, with a hint of why they are referenced... 1 J.G. Ballard, A Users Guide to the Millenium, essay entitled "Fictions of Every Kind," pp2052 for those interested in the digital and analog versions of information and representation, a good place to start is Jeremy Campbell's "Grammatical Man" (Simon and Schuster)3 Joseph Beuys lectures from his talk "I am searching for a field character" from the catalog of he ICA 1974 exhibition entitled "Art into Society/Society into Art"4 lewis mumford, Art and technics, pp96-985 G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, pp12-136 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beutiful and the Sublime, pp517 Hal Foster, Recodings, pp518 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, pp969 W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk, pp510 Sigmund Freud,Writings on Literature and Art, pp213-1411 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, pp1312 ibid, pp4913 Erik Davis, Techgnosis, pp4114 John Keats, "Lamia" excerpt from: Keats: the Complete Poems, pp43115 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, Univeristy of Chicago Press, pp 381-8216 Marshall Mcluhan and Wilfred Watson, From Cliche to Archetype, pp34 |
Référence: http://www.djspooky.com/uncanny.html