In all the years I've been working on the thing, there's an essay I've avoided citing. Peter Hutchinson: "Mannerism in the Abstract", in Battcock's Minimalism anthology. I have it. I bought it or stole it 40 years ago. I've read it and remembered it and put it out my mind more than once. Maybe it was just that it helped me too much and I wanted to struggle.
Contemporary Mannerist work sometimes gets so extreme in its use of acid color, exaggeration of shape, and in its drama that it appears hysterical. Indeed in today’s reaction against Romanticism, against Freudian explanation, against pure logic, these artists see themselves as useless members in a society where everybody is useless. Where art was once the only useless thing, now everything has lost meaning. If the artist himself feels he is losing meaning, no wonder he reacts with hysteria. He does super works with the directionless energy of a hysteric – and the result is often hysteria’s attendant paralysis. The coldness, the lack of motion, the acidity of color, the lack of detail (expression), are Mannerist symptoms felt before in other centuries in times of mounting disbelief. Bronzino’s human contemporary view will break out into horizons broader than hitherto, views not seen entirely from the human scope. It would be a true Mannerist convention that works done despairingly, that desperately parody, should turn out to be truly significant.
The scientist offers a hopeful world, a world where inevitable progress discovers more and more, a world that gets better and better. This world is sane, stable, and knows where it is going. The Mannerist counters with a world in intellectual hysteria, punctuated by frozen activity, a world where space-time cease to have meaning, a world of soundless gestures, where humans do not live.
But there's an even weirder example: pathological. I was a huge fan of Robert Smithson in the early 80s. I was working for his dealer in 1985. I read his writing, even reciting one of his essays in a video. The first time I saw a Koons I got the fucking point. In art as opposed to literature—I read Calvino and Borges as a teenager—Smithson was at the beginning of all this shit. I cover all of it in the manuscript but about Smithson himself, nothing... NOTHING.
"A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art" (1968)
Peter Hutchinson, author of "Is There Life on Earth?" (Art in America, Fall 1966), uses the discards of last year's future in order to define today's present. His method is highly artificial and is composed of paralyzed quotes, listless theories, and bland irony. His abandoned planets maintain unthinkable "cultures," and have tasteless "tastes." In "Mannerism in the Abstract" (Art and Artists, September 1966) Hutchinson lets us know about "probabilities, contingencies, chances, and cosmic breakdown." "Scientism" is shown to be actually a kind of Mannerist science full of obvious disguises and false bottoms. "Topology surely mocks plane geometry," says Hutchinson. But actually his language usage de- liberately mocks his own meaning, so that nothing is left but a gratuitous syn- tactical device. His writing is marvelously "inauthentic." The complexity and richness of Hutchinson's method starts with science fiction cliches, and scientis- tic conservations and ends in an extraordinary esthetic structure. To paraphrase Nathalie Sarraute on Flaubert,"Here Hutchinson's defects become virtues."
"Abstract Mannerism" (1966-67)
Ever since Clement Greenberg took over T. S. Eliot's role as the formalist culture-hero, he has been the keeper of abstract "quality." The word "quality" has many propaganda purposes. It is used in the art world the same way it is used in the advertising world. "The canvas standard stands for quality," Marcel Duchamp might say. Nevertheless, it was Greenberg, who in his flight from hard-core Cubism to soft-core Cubism, i.e., from Picasso to Morris Louis, stumbled on that great Mannerism, ultra-consciousness of the "framing edge." Before we go on, let us look back into awful art history. Jacques Bousquet in his book Mannerism says, "By a typically Mannerist paradox, the frame became the picture. In France, the feigned frame enjoyed great vogue." Meanwhile, back at the Avant-Garde, which is beyond history, Greenberg tells us in his essay,"American type" Painting, "What is destroyed is the Cubist, and immemorial, notion and feeling of the picture edge as a confine; with (Barnett) Newman, the picture edge is repeated inside, and makes the picture, instead of merely being echoed." History repeats itself, but in the Abstract.
"From Ivan The Terrible to Roger Corman or Paradoxes of Conduct in Mannerism as Reflected in the Cinema" (1967)
The films of Alfred Hitchcock are Mannerist on every level. "As early as the credit list monstrous faces writhe on a background of threatening sky," says Andre Techine writing in Cahiers du Cinema, "The obsolete device of double exposure is reinforced by the crudity of grimaces. No artifice is spared the spectator. The contrivances are avowed." Torn Curtain is perhaps even more manneristic than Vertigo. Hitchcock's actors, like the figures in pictures by Jacopo da Pontormo, seem trapped in a beautiful prison that produces intricate types of "visual nausea." (See Mannerism-Style and Mood by Daniel B. Rowland.) A sweetness of color pervades the totalitarian settings in Torn Curtain. One thinks of the moods defined in Vladimir Nabokov's novels. In Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov seems to be describing the Hitchcockian view, "I am here through an error—not in this prison, specifically, but in this whole terrible, striped world; a world which seems not a bad example of amateur craftsmanship, but is in reality calamity, horror, madness, error—and look, the curio slays the tourist, the gigantic carved bear brings its wooden mallet down on me." The red ribbons, that represent a fire in a ballet scene, in Torn Curtain, suggest a means of escape to Paul Newman (scientist-spy) when he shouts "Fire." A panic turns Julie Andrews' face into a mask of exhaustion not unlike the swooning face of the Virgin in Pontormo's Deposition. The "amateur craftsmanship" is everywhere in Hitchcock's mise en scene, from the ghastly green glow over roof tops in Vertigo to the diabolical sky in The Birds. Hitchcock's humor informs every terrible situation he takes his "bad" actors through. His settings are a vast simulacra built by an evil demiurge, and peopled with frozen automatons.
But for all the empty pretension of the technocratic intellectual elite, most of life, one way or another, is craft.
I remember once, long ago, I used to not do commercials and said I didn’t believe in them. And then they said, “Ken Loach has done quite a few of them.” So I phoned up Ken and he said, “If you don’t take money out of those capitalist pockets, then someone else will, and you’ve got mouths to feed. Do it!”
Mike Leigh, just like the biggest Hollywood directors, production designers and cinematographers, makes commercials. The money flows like water. You can have a lot of fun spending three million dollars for a 30 second spot.But as with cathedral ceilings, it’s not the dogma that matters, but what you do with it.As I tried to explain to one of the leaders of the MIT symposia, an anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago, the interesting thing about ads now is that they’ve become almost independent of their function: a good spot can by no more than a 30 second movie with a name at the end; the actual “ad” is 2 seconds, now associated with the 28 second comedy that preceded it. Or it’s tiny film with "product placement". The definition of art hasn’t changed, because people haven’t changed. And the men and women, the craftspeople, some with hand tools and paint who get their hands dirty, and some with electronics, who together make the ads that the intellectuals of Madison avenue dream up, laugh. And if the ads are remembered they’ll be remembered as cathedral ceilings are, by people who have no interest in Jesus Christ or Alka Seltzer.
There are other examples both more extreme than Frampton’s, and less. Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,N,G restages Duchamp’s demispheres and Anemic Cinema, as desperation. The flickering image of a man with his tongue sticking out between the blades of a pair of scissors is such an obvious image of castration that it renders anything else secondary. Add to that the voice repeating the word “destroy-destroy-destroy-destroy…” –the auditory equivalent of a flicker– and you get an art of symptom described by the artist and appreciative critics as “structuralism”.
I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of: celluloid two dimensional strips; individual rectangular frames; the nature of sprockets and emulsion; projector operations; the three dimensional reflective screen surface; the retinal screen; optic nerve and individual psycho-physical subjectivities of consciousness. In this cinematic drama, light is energy rather than a tool for the representation of non-filmic objects; light as energy is released to create its own objects, shapes and textures. Given the fact of retinal inertia and the flickering shutter mechanism of film projection, one may generate virtual forms. create actual motion (rather than illustrate it), build actual color- space (rather than picture it). and be involved in actual time (immediate presence).[i]
This is the denial of representation in the presence of representation in its most blunt form. It’s not the elision and denial of Eliot or James; it’s exhibitionismand denial, more absurd than the earnest description of Mapplethorpe photographs, if only because Mapplethorpe himself didn’t write them. T,O,U,C,H,N,G, likeso much 20thcentury art –Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, like all philosophy is the theological literature of rationalism – is about the desire and refusal of contact, wanting and refusing to be touched. It didn’t shock me or offend me the first time I saw it. I saw the antecedents. I’d never go out of my way to argue that it was ‘bad’. But I was shocked to hear the film described as formal and not pathology and ritual.
…Paul went to the piano and he sat down at the piano and he had a wine glass and he was out of his mind and he beat the wine glass on the piano and then he beat his hands on the glass until he was just bleeding and numb and dizzy. He started to get up and I happened to be at his elbow and I said “Whoa, whoa, Paul, wait, whoa wait a minute,” because he was gushing blood everywhere, and I said, “Is anyone a doctor here? Is anyone a doctor?” And the place was completely packed shoulder to shoulder at this party, so one of the people near by was a doctor. Paul was just in a daze and I said, “Look at this—is this life-threatening?” And he said, “No, it’s not life-threatening, it’s O.K.,” and I said “Paul, go for it, just hold your hands up and walk around.” And Paul went around bleeding out of his hands with his hands held in front of him, almost like Frankenstein and created a swath of horror in front of him. It was a very startling moment, and there were other episodes that people will happily relate to you, in which Paul wrecks a car or climbs up on top of a roof and drops off and breaks his this or that. Paul went through a series of things where he acted out and finally what I began to notice about these things is that Paul would never hurt anybody else. He may have once or twice actually done something that was importune, but only secondarily, and it was mainly something that hurt Paul somehow, and always in a very flamboyant situation. He liked to live dangerously. Paul liked life. He seemed like he needed this kind of way of doing things. He really did.
He lived on a special plane somehow that normal people can’t touch.[ii]
Sharits behavior is less unnerving than the equally pathological response of his friend and fellow avant-gardist Tony Conrad. This is the hip, underground, American Modernist version of the American straight-world, Time-Life–CBS view of Warhol as a celebrant of style. But glamour is vanity. Warhol's Jackies and Marilyns, Disastersand Electric Chairs, his films with his Superstarswere all equally memento mori. He watched people who were out of control and let them be, as Callie Angell put it, out of a Catholic understanding of free will, while Conrad is a voyeur blind to his own desires. The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny.
“Paul, go for it, just hold your hands up and walk around.” A medical professional would call it enabling.
But Hawthorne and Lawrence, and Tarantino, Spielberg and Pynchon, novelists and filmmakers, are not ‘artists’, and Frampton and Sharits are. Their work is shown only in the context of the contemporary art world as defined by Arthur Danto, which American philosophy is optimistic.
It’s telling that Fried makes an exception for film, which he refers as “the movies”, ignoring the avant-garde entirely.
It is the overcoming of theatre that modernist sensibility finds most exalting and that it experiences as the hallmark of high art in our time. There is, however, one art that, by its very nature, escapes theatre entirely—the movies.* This helps explain why movies in general, including frankly appalling ones, are acceptable to modernist sensibility whereas all but the most successful painting, sculpture, music, and poetry is not. Because cinema escapes theatre— automatically, as it were—it provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theatre and theatricality. At the same time, the automatic, guaranteed character of the refuge—more accurately, the fact that what is provided is a refuge from theatre and not a triumph over it, absorption not conviction—means that the cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art.
*Exactly how the movies escape theatre is a beautiful question, and there is no doubt but that a phenomenology of the cinema that concentrated on the similarities and differences between it and the theatre—eg., that in the movies the actors are mot physically present, the film itself is projected away from us, the screen is mot experienced as a kind of object existing, so to speak, in a specific physical relation to us, etc. –would be extremely rewarding. Cavell, again, has called attention, in conversation, to the sort of remembering that goes into giving an account of a movie, and more generally to the nature of the difficulties that are involved in giving such an account.[iii]
The footnote is taken from the essay as published in Artforumand later in Battcock's anthology. Reprinted in 1998, beautifulis replaced with difficult, rewarding has been stripped on its modifier, and the last sentence with the reference to Cavell and memory has been removed.[iv]
The last paragraph
This essay will be read as an attack on certain artists (and critics) and as a defense of others. And of course it is true that the desire to distinguish between what is to me the authentic art of our time and other work, which, whatever the dedication, passion, and intelligence of its creators, seems to me to share certain characteristics associated here with the concepts of literalism and theatre,' has largely motivated what I have written. In these last sentences, how ever, I want to call attention to the utter pervasiveness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theatre. We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.
The final sentence almost makes me laugh… Sharits’ “immediate presence”.
In 2004 MIT press published Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. Chronophobia: the fear of time. The author calls it a neologism, but it isn’t. It’s also at the core to the author’s own writing. Pamela M Lee, now at Yale has the title “historian and theorist of contemporary art”. She’s a historian of the present. Forgetting the Art World, came out in 2012, 48 years after Danto named it. Her most recent book is The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption, “How Silicon Valley, the dark net, and digital culture have affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth.”
Art historian Pamela Lee reads this event as a fairy tale of disruption rather than an isolated episode in the history of the dark net, Silicon Valley, and the relationship between public libraries and digital culture. Lee argues that the notion of “disruptive” technology in contemporary culture has radically affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. Against the backdrop of her account of Ulbricht and his exploits, Lee provides original readings of five women artists—Gretchen Bender, Cecile B. Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms—who weigh in, either explicitly or inadvertently, on the nature of contemporary media and technology. Written as a work of experimental art criticism, The Glen Park Library is both a homage to the Bay Area and an excoriation of the ethos of Silicon Valley. As with all fairy tales, the book's ultimate subjects are much greater, however, and Lee casts a critical eye on collisions between privacy and publicity, knowledge and information, and the past and future that are enabled by the technocratic worldview.
The foreword is written by a curator at MoMA. Again it’s the aestheticization of politics, and the aesthetic shared by philosophy and luxury commodities, but also now an almost explicit combination of (ersatz) moralism and technocratic decadence. No longer even sincere hypocrisy or earnest contradiction, it’s a blank obliviousness, the innocence of the children of the conflicted and hypocritical who’ve never had to even pretend to face real politics.
Chronophobia isn’t wrong about the 60s any more than the curators of the Duchamp exhibition were wrong to mention David Lynch. But they ignored Hitchcock, and so does Lee. There’s plenty of discussion here of “nuclear apocalypse and entertainment”; there’s an interesting chapter on Tinguely and Homage to New York, but no mention of Kubrick and Strangelove. There’s discussion of the Jonathan Edwards and Fried’s earnest academic moralism –hard to ignore since Fried begins and ends with him– but none of the deeper because visceral Puritanism in the work of Judd or Andre.
Lee ignores Hitchcock, but So does Barbara Rose. Lee has a chapter on Bridget Riley and on Op art, describing an art not of communication but effect. The connections by now should be clear.
To what extent do we see this painting? In what lies its retinal appeal? To what extent do we not so much see it but feel it, experience the picture less as an abstraction than as a woozy sense of gravity visited on the body—a body endlessly subjected to the vagaries of time? Stand a little longer, look a little harder, and then what happens? In time, the surface begins to flicker, like a stroboscope; or wave, like a lenticular screen. Look longer still, and surprising colors—psychedelic phantoms—emanate from between the lines. Spangles of gold, pink, and green burst and flash, lining the eyelids, rattling the skull. The eye is enervated while the body feels something else: nausea, perhaps, or even a blinding headache.
…Op’s virtual fetish of visuality occasions a reading of the body under the conditions of a shifting technological culture and, more to the point, how the time of that body speaks to the repressive consequences of a burgeoning technocracy. The body, I want to argue, is the blind spot to Op’s obsession with the technological; and it is its temporality that gives the lie to this. The body performs what Op’s supporters insistently failed to see. More often than not, this body is a specifically gendered body, feminized and thus deemed impotent.
Lee, following the logic of the academic culture that made her, she’s now an editor at October, both condescends to Riley and defends her: critics’ description of passivity and impotence is merely the dismissing of the female. We’re back to another version of the art of the index, an art that can be read as an art of ideas, of intention, whether admitted or not. Somehow or other, art has to have a program, a “project” and a core of optimism.
This notion is critical to the deepening suspicion, even paranoia, about Op. Nevertheless, Op was considered user-friendly stuff in spite of the aggression attributed to it, its eye-hurting glare, virtually hypnotic powers, and nausea-inducing effects. As Barbara Rose put it cynically: “Op is absolutely gratifying in this respect because you know that you have gotten the message once nausea or vertigo set in.”
The title of Rose’s review is “Beyond Vertigo: Optical Art At The Modern”. Lee makes one reference to Hitchcock elsewhere, mentioning him in his connection Saul Bass—“the graphic designer best known for his title sequences to Alfred Hitchcock”, but no mention of their most famous collaboration. I dealt with this more than 30 years ago, linking Duchamp to Hitchcock to mechanically ‘optical’ abstraction:
Vertigo is an early precedent here as it is to all later artistic use of psychedelic imagery, images of the subconscious, Op-Art patterning or illustrations of drug-induced states. Pynchon uses similar terms, central to the American romance –what it has become– and its relations with the physical world and the psychosis of modern life. These are images of the loss of the self, unable to define its surroundings, to distinguish itself from them, and thus being relegated to passive observation.
My language is stilted but it makes the point. The illustration –graphic stimulus– of immediate sensorial effect is experience without effort, passive. Much of the art of the 1960s describes that experience, because much of popular visual culture manifests it. Lee quotes a newspaper editorial responding to the show.
And what is the point of this, someone will ask? Well the point is this, that art is the expression of the age. The pressures and upheavals of our time have the same effect on our observers: Now you see it, now you don’t. Now the facts are clear, now the facts are muddled grey. The distortion of old values, and the crowding of new cultures, presents a peculiar aspect to the eye. It is painful.
Who is to tell what are the facts in Viet Nam, for instance? The government of one day is not the government of the next; the actions of our own officials there are deliberately distorted, and friend slips into foe and back again. The alliances with Europe are not what they seem, and the image of the Communist world clashes with reality. . . . It is all painful.
Lee adds, “One might forgive the authorless editorial its tired clichés about art (‘art is the expression of the age’)" .
And what else is it?
And what else is she? Lee is roughly my age. After undergraduate years at Yale she went to The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, at the time a hotbed of artistic and political radicalism, where academic theory met luxury commodities. We have mutual acquaintances if not friends: people who are now curators at major US Museums and the people who told me I couldn’t be a leftist because I worked with my hands, who condescended to me even as I built their projects, since they designed their art and were proudly manually incompetent. They dealt as she does with ideas and concepts, the idea of art and the of idea of politics, neither of which are synonyms for the things themselves; the aestheticization of politics is the politics of design. Immateriality is clean by definition. The curatorial and critical studies program at the ISP has been rebranded. and students are now “Helena Rubinstein Fellows”, fitting culture of vanguardism and culture of “disruption”of Madison avenue.
The weakness of Chronophobia becomes clear once you realize she needs to take “Art and Objecthood” seriously as anything more than a relic, her belief that it must be more than a product of its age, because it was written by an academic, about fine art.
This book takes the oblique view of technology and art in the 1960s and it does so with a concept introduced at the outset: the matter of time. Time and technology, I want to argue, are twinned phenomena in that decade; and works of art provide special insight into this relationship as much as they model that relationship in turn. Time, we shall see, plays no small role in the richly diverse practices that constitute sixties art making. From performance to painting to sculpture to “new media,” time becomes both a thematic and structural fixture, an obsession, for critics, artists, and audiences of that moment. It will come to signal something about technological change.
The “richly diverse practices that constitute sixties art making” includes The Rolling Stones, Pierrot le Fou, The Armies of the Night, The Flintstones, Albert Ayler, and Woodstock. That list is a joke because any list would be. Lee refers to Slaughterhouse Five and an article by Pynchon from 1984 but as with her discussion of CP Snow’s Two Cultures, she focuses on things that are now seen by most people as relics. And Snow is a relic too
Snow’s position was critical in articulating the historical confluence of arts and sciences from the sixties forward: the lecture anticipated, in numerous ways, what would later be described as the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity within academia.
This is the academia of “modernist projects”, of Weber and von Neumann, of post war rationalism and the capitalism of the golden age, the technophilia of Daston and Galison, and MIT, the home now of “The Futures of Entertainment”
The Futures of Entertainment is an annual event which explores the current state and future of media properties, brands, and audiences and the way these groups interact and intersect with one another. By combining a mix of leading media studies scholars and cutting-edge media and marketing practitioners from a diverse range of locations and sectors--in conjunction with fans, activists, journalists, analysts, and other voices--in lengthy discussion, this two-day conference explores how the media industries are evolving, how storytelling is changing and the shifting dynamics in how people relate to media properties and brands.
The tagline for these events is that they are “at the intersection of industry and academia”.
The positivist definition of art is illustration. If fine art has devolved into design, it still performs the function of art: the following of sensibility, responding to experiences, perceptions. But to ad men, like philosophers, art is successful communication as seen in metrics, and is designed as computer games are in the service of “fun”. The MIT communication department model of creativity follows the enthusiasm of the designers of Assassin’s Creed, and Gears of War, blind not even to subtext but to direct meaning, a blindness matching the enthusiasts of the “formalism” of the films of Paul Sharits. For all the discussion of the delivery of content, the content itself is seen as meaningless. This is the world of ideas, the academia that claims to provide a foundation for capitalism and anti-capitalism, revolution, Wall St. and Madison Avenue. But for all the empty pretension of the technocratic intellectual elite, most of life, one way or another, is craft.
I remember once, long ago, I used to not do commercials and said I didn’t believe in them. And then they said, “Ken Loach has done quite a few of them.” So I phoned up Ken and he said, “If you don’t take money out of those capitalist pockets, then someone else will, and you’ve got mouths to feed. Do it!”[v]
Mike Leigh, just like the biggest Hollywood directors, production designers and cinematographers, makes commercials. The money flows like water. You can have a lot of fun spending three million dollars for a 30 second spot.But as with cathedral ceilings, it’s not the dogma that matters, but what you do with it.As I tried to explain to one of the leaders of the MIT symposia, an anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago, the interesting thing about ads now is that they’ve become almost independent of their function: a good spot can by no more than a 30 second movie with a name at the end; the actual “ad” is 2 seconds, now associated with the 28 second comedy that preceded it. Or it’s tiny film with "product placement". The definition of art hasn’t changed, because people haven’t changed. And the men and women, the craftspeople, some with hand tools and paint who get their hands dirty, and some with electronics, who together make the ads that the intellectuals of Madison avenue dream up, laugh. And if the ads are remembered they’ll be remembered as cathedral ceilings are, by people who have no interest in Jesus Christ or Alka Seltzer.Beyond that of course, all comparisons fall apart. Ads are art, but they’re disposable, what jingles are to pop songs. But to the academics who study and serve Madison Avenue, corporate communication is art in the service of a cause. Instead of Church censors’ stamp of approval, or Diderot’s defense of Greuze’ moralism, or the bromides ofsocialist realism, or theart of the “Modern Project”, we get a new brand of philosophic art, the vanguardism of the marketplace.
[i] Paul Sharits, "Notes on Films/1966-1968”, Film Culture 47(Summer 1969) p.13.
[ii] Tony Conrad, “On Paul Sharits: An Excerpt from ‘I Was a Flawed Modernist’”, The Brooklyn Rail, April 1 2017,
[iv] Jonathan T. D. Neil, “’Structural Film,’ as Technique of History”, 2004 unpublished http://jonathantdneil.com/pdfs/StructuralFilmAsTechniqueOfHistory.pdf
Banality, Boredom, Culture, Determinism, Feminism and Post-Feminism, Mannerism and The Gothic, Naturalism, Philosophy, Politics, Sexuality,
Before the 19th century, "glamour" referred to a spell cast by a witch to cause people (generally men) to see things or people (usually the bewitcher herself) as the enchantress wished. She could create an irresistible impression on the minds of men in order to weaken them and lead them to perdition. Usually via sex.
The medieval and modern concepts of glamour meet in The Love Witch, L.A.-based feminist filmmaker Anna Biller's stunning second feature, which follows the havoc being wreaked by a love-obsessed witch and crafter (seriously, she makes soaps and candles) named Elaine. She arrives in a California town like a Hitchcock heroine and immediately begins casting spells on all the men in her path; she's a sexual Goldilocks trying to find one who's just right.
Biller's carefully constructed imagery is dazzling: colorful sets, detailed props (many of which are either handmade or authentic antiques), spot-on casting of character actors with looks seldom seen in contemporary cinema, and a lead actress (newcomer Samantha Robinson as Elaine) made up and styled to mesmerizing effect.
...Having a deep love and understanding of classic Hollywood glamour made Biller a misfit among her self-serious, mostly male, Stan Brakhage–influenced classmates. According to the director, her very aesthetic was controversial. The artifice of acting and emoting, anything theatrical, was considered vulgar by the art-film establishment.
That she's a woman wasn't trivial, either. Like many film students of the era, Biller was influenced by Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," with its critique of the pervasive "male gaze."
As a writer, Biller has studied the dynamics between the genders and says it's where she gets her psychological material. "There is the danger of falling in love and becoming destroyed by it," she says. "I think that this is why men avoid it: They're afraid of it, they want it to be more playful and just about sex because they don't want to be destroyed by love." Elaine's power is that she is better than men at love and certainly more dominant — she can just rip their hearts out.
Biller's domestic partner is, in fact, also an expert on a different kind of "love witchcraft": She's in a relationship with Robert Greene, author of corporate management/inspiration best-seller The 48 Laws of Power — and also of erotic advice best-seller The Art of Seduction.
Strange personalities arise in the cracks of disintegrating institutions. They are often marked by extravagant dress, inflated rhetoric, and a show of sexual power....
We live at a moment when it is clear that art can be made of anything, and where there is no mark through which works of art can be perceptually different from the most ordinary of objects.
If a character in a novel lights a cigarette, the cigarette is part of a work of art. In a play the cigarette is a prop. In the older definition of art objects the craft supplied a formal logic internal to the piece. The iconography supplied an formal logic external to it. For relics as opposed to artworks the logic was external only: absent its place in a narrative, a thighbone is a thighbone, a cigarette is just a cigarette, a madeleine... etc.
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still scribbling
repeats, from 20 years ago, but posted here at the start, others more recent, and some new, all written out of the process of trying to articulate what I've always taken for granted. There are a few conflicts.
The only difference between a well reasoned argument about a metaphysical subject and a badly reasoned one is the complexity of the portrait of the author and of his ideas. There is no difference in their value outside of that. Complex sophistry remains sophistry.
All art is sophistry.
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Something can be judged a work of it art if its arguments are rendered with an idiosyncratic subtlety beyond what is necessary to communicate its ideas, and which may even oppose them, but which so colors our perceptions that we can not separate the sensibility from the idea without feeling a loss.
Subtlety beyond necessity but not without purpose.
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A few years ago, at a gallery opening I got into a conversation with an astrophysicist from Caltech; we were mutual friends of the curator. He felt slightly dragged along. He was game but said he didn’t understand art. The conversation drifted, and he mentioned a book he was reading, a biography of Sandy Koufax, the great pitcher for the Dodgers, in Brooklyn and LA. He said what he liked most was the way the author wrote not only as an observer, a professional sportswriter, and fan, but as a woman, an outsider in the world of male athletics, and as a Jew writing about Koufax, another Jew and outsider in the gentile world of professional sports. He said her description of those relations was really interesting. I asked him if he could have described any of it as she had. He said no. I told him he understood art.
Something is "beautiful" if it is seen to manifest a unifying order beyond that which is commonly acknowledged in everyday experience. It has no necessary relation, as extension, to being "pretty". A desolate wasteland is beautiful. "It’s a truism that the mushroom clouds at the end of Dr. Strangelove are beautiful."
Beauty in the products of human activity is seen at it's highest level as manifesting an order that is taken to model a moral (integral) order of the world as a whole, but which at the same time is seen as inseparable from its immediate form (words, sound, substance) so that the mind experiences a conflict, a moment of aphasia.
Even if, as is often the case, the audience admits to wanting to ascribe a "truth" to the work in its relation to the world, they will admit that the "truth" is nonexistent outside of the material arrangements that make up the work. For language to be "beautiful" in this sense, rhythm and tone are no less important than syntax. The total structure of a poem is seen as beautiful, not simply the "meaning" of the sentences. Art is a lie that compels you to believe while reminding you again and again of its artificiality, of the craft that brought that illusion into being. A Stendhal moment is a moment of crisis, when the perceiving subject is caught between desire for a thing to be fully real, combined with an equally powerful awareness that it's not.
Art is material arrangement.
Art makes/describes the world as more interesting than it is.
Film was until recently our most easily immersive art, but the best films have always been those where the arrangements, shots, cuts, and staging, remain foregrounded, not merely telegraphed as "style" but inseparable from the other elements of the film. The best films remind us of their artifice as much as sculptures never let us to forget they're carved in stone. We always see the craft in Hitchcock and John Ford. And it's the craft that we remember as much as we remember the worlds made out of it. We sit watching worlds we want to be real, while equally enraptured by the crafting of the lie.
Art makes/describes a world more interesting than ours, a world where every object and event is suffused with meaning. Rocks and trees as things in the world are meaningless: religion ascribes meanings to them. But a drawing of a rock or a tree is the product of our "intelligent design"; meanings are a given, and the humanities are no more or less than varieties of comparative religion.
All of us recreate the world through our preferences; there is no value free perception. Artists regulate and ironize the illusions that most of us live without thinking. Philosophy, compared to art, is pedantry, predicated on the assumption that irony need only be directed outward, at best referring to self directed irony as an idea, or concept, whereas in the arts it's the foundation of a practice. Philosophy is predicated on the ideal of a total, global, or universal, view. The arts are built from the fact that we all imagine such views for ourselves, that they're shared by no one else, and that the one thing we can share is the awareness of that fact.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte
repeats of repeats of... because I was in the mood.
Listening to the second in a series of mixes by the house DJ at a boutique hotel in Paris and wondering at the first track. Looking it up and realizing both what should have been obvious and how it makes perfect sense.
There I held a trembling hand
Seeking shelter in strange apartments
Til the day they turned her in
Being Judases of nowadays
I think of Fassbinder
I experienced the modern version of The Floating World for the first time in the late 90's, at a small private party in a rented room on the lower east side. I said to someone it felt like Limbo as an airport lounge in 1974. The soundtrack was Air, and I amused myself a bit more by deciding that Prada was Halston in brown.
The effect is akin to a narcosis that not only slows but regulates motion. It's Chaplin's Modern Times at 5 frames per second, with the gears wrapped in fine silk: aestheticized anesthetic motion. The rhythms, bass and snare and little clicks invite improvisatory response, touches of free will in a rigidly deterministic world. At 1:20 when the strings come in and at 1:29 when they modulate and the plane begins to glide across the screen I get a shiver of aphasia.
And the the scream at 0:26 is Hitchcock.
Voodoo Lounge, Las Vegas. 4 AM, Feb, 2008
Doris Days, To Ulrike M, I:Cube, Adore, FC Kahuna, Hayling
Monday, June 29, 2015
What an idiot. Mostly repeats but since I'm reading him, rewriting the paper.
We live at a moment when it is clear that art can be made of anything, and where there is no mark through which works of art can be perceptually different from the most ordinary of objects.
If a character in a novel lights a cigarette, the cigarette is part of a work of art. In a play the cigarette is a prop. In the older definition of art objects the craft supplied a formal logic internal to the piece. The iconography supplied a formal logic external to it. For relics as opposed to artworks the logic was external only: absent its place in a narrative a thighbone is a thighbone, a cigarette is just a cigarette, a madeleine... etc.
The critics and other who mock contemporary art as the painted word have a point, but you could just as well call it the literature of objects. The response is to say that they're witnessing a long distance conversation, in short sentences, haikus and one liners, where one person may be responding to something someone else said a year before. If all you hear is the punchline you won't get the joke. If they say that's not enough, tell them to go watch a movie. But Danto can't admit that film is visual art as he defines it, for the same reason he can't see Socrates as an orator, or as a character in Plato's dialogues.
I always thought the argument was silly, but I never read it in his own words. He just doesn't look.
Duchamp's Fountain is, as everyone knows, to all outward appearances a urinal- it was a urinal until it became a work of art and acquired such further proper ties as works of art possess in excess of those possessed by mere real things like urinals (the work is dated 1917, though it would take research into the history of plumbing to determine the date of the urinal, which made it possible for Duchamp to use urinals dated later than Fountain when the original was lost: the work remains dated 1917). In his own view he chose this particular object for what he hoped was its aesthetic neutrality. Or pretended that that is what he hoped. For urinals have too strong a cultural, not to say amoral identity, quite to allow them selves to be without affect. They are objects, to begin with, highly sexualized through the fact that women are anatomically barred from employing them in their primary function, at least without awkwardness. [a urinal is an inverted triangle a man sticks his cock in!] So they show their arrogant exclusivity through their form. (The fear of equal access to all johns was a major factor, it will be remembered, in the defeat of the ERA.) They are, moreover, given the cultural realities, objects associated with privacy (though less so than stools) and with dirt. But any object that lies at the intersection of sex and secretion is too obviously charged by the moral boundaries it presupposes simply to stand as a culturally neutral object picked out just for its aesthetic neutrality. Duchamp was being disingenuous when he asked: "A urinal-who would be interested in that?" It would be like taking the filthiest verb in the language as one's paradigm for teaching conjugation: possibly the word's moral energy will go submerged as one ponders it from the perspective of gerunds and pluperfects, but why struggle when there are plenty of innocent words? It is, meanwhile, ingenuous to treat the urinal merely as an aesthetic object, rather like the Taj Mahal in its elegant gradients and dazzling whiteness. But then what is the conceptual fulcrum of this still controversial work? My view is that it lies in the question it poses, namely why-referring to itself-should this be an art work when something else exactly like this, namely that -referring now to the class of unredeemed urinals- are just pieces of industrial plumbing? It took genius to raise the question in this form,since nothing like it had been raised before, though from Plato (sharply) and unimaginatively answered on the basis of the accepted art world of the time. Duchamp did not merely raise the question, What is Art? but rather why is something a work of art when something exactly like it is not? Compare Freud's great question regarding parapraxes, which is not simply why do we forget but why, when we do forget, do we remember something else instead? This form of the question opened space for a radically new theory of the mind. And in Duchamp's case the question he raises as an artwork has a genuinely philosophical form, and though it could have been raised with any object you chose (and was raised by means of quite nondescript objects) -in contrast with having been capable of being raised at any time you chose-for the question was only historically possible when in fact it was raised- it perhaps required something so antecedently resistant to absorption into the art world as a urinal so as to call attention to the fact that it after all was already in the art world.
There is a deep question of what internal evolution in the history of art made Duchamp's question-object historically possible if not historically necessary. My view is that it could only come at a time when it no longer could be clear to anyone what art was while perfectly clear that none of the old answers would serve.To paraphrase Kant, it seemed to have an essence without having any particular essence. It is here that Hegel's views come in.
For Hegel, the world in its historical dimension is the dialectical revelation of consciousness to itself. In his curious idiom, the end of history comes when spirit achieves awareness of its identity as spirit, not, that is to say, alienated from itself by ignorance of its proper nature, but united to itself through itself: by recognizing that it is in this one instance of the same substance as its object, since consciousness of consciousness is consciousness. In the portentous jargon of the Continent, the subject/object dualism is overcome.
The collage shows the narrative context for Duchamp's "joke", "relic", "punchline".
There is a deep question of what internal evolution in the history of art made Duchamp's question-object historically possible if not historically necessary.
No. Art is a means through which we look at the world and our desires. Media and techniques rise and fall in use as they become more or less appropriate to our sensibilities. People from one generation or trained in specific form will stay loyal to what they know, even as they respond to the present.
Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only “art”—not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning and “commercial design,” the only visual art entirely alive.
Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures”
Porcelain figurines like urinals are mass produced, but the originals are made by skilled craftspeople.
repeats: Duchamp, Warhol, Hitchcock, and Manet, Picasso etc.
Saturday, May 17, 2014
"Behind the chiliasm of modern man, is the megalomania of self-infinitization."
Daniel Bell
Isolation and imagined community. Obvious, but why not.
1913 Stravinsky
1951 Pollock
1958 Hitchcock
The beginning of Vertigo renders the infinite of outer space as the infinite of inner space, but the imagery is the same. North by Northwest, 1959, begins with Max Weber via Mies van der Rohe.
More on the title designer Saul Bass, the director of Phase IV, a not unsympathetic portrait of a victorious hive mind
Joseph Kerman on Milton Babbitt
His writing of the 1950s had developed into a strange amalgam. Conjoined with a fanatical scientism, a search for quasi-logical precision of reference which tortured his syntax into increasingly Jamesian spirals for very un-Jamesian ends, there was an undertone of distress, even rage, erupting into repeated assaults and innuendos directed against various predictable targets. This scarcely contained emotion issued obviously (and openly enough) from the same sense of modernist alienation as was expressed very differently by Schoenberg or, to take an even more extravagant case, Adorno.
"Expressionism in the atomic age is the product of technocracy and the bomb, the emotion escaping the denial of emotion; it's the melodrama behind positivism, from Vienna to Weimar to New York, the relation of Strangelove to von Neumann."
Repeats, again, and again, and again… Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum -the violence and warmth- of neurological overload.
All of this is obvious. I picked the list from what I had and out of a hat. I could have begun a lot earlier than I did, and I skipped the hippies. I skipped acid and went straight to MDMA. For contemporary megalomania see the back-to-nature fantasies of Avatar; Cameron's hated as a dictator by almost everyone who worked on it. For Detroit and Techno, go here.
2013 A short doc about a DJ, Nina Kraviz
I'm not going to moralize about a decline of culture; forms decay, culture changes. But the fish rots from the motherfucking head, and new life grows in the rot.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
An open letter from a philosophy professor to Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Yes, he's a vulgarian, and so was Sagan. A debate between an auto mechanic and a bunch of anxious priests. Obsequious but wounded. Pathetic.
a repeat, and repeats of repeats. All I'm doing is waiting, and waiting is annoying.
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in re: discussions of philosophical naturalism and of the theory of art. NewApps, specifically a comment by Jon Cogburn: his defense of Danto and Noel Carroll. On Criticism reviewed at NDPR See also discussion of naturalism and Rosenberg, incl. my comment, at Leiter
I thought I'd put this put ages ago, but maybe not.
It's from the big paper. I had it on the web, but it's down. Still trying to find a real home for it. Basic notes, here.
The photo collage above is the best simple debunking I know of philosophers' arguments about Duchamp. The images are Ingres' La Source, Courbet's Origin of the World, a Sevres porcelain (1921) after an 18th century original by Etienne Maurice Falconet, and Duchamp's Fountain. The only thing I should need to add is that the Courbet was made for private view. The same holds of course for any urinal.
Duchamp/ Hitchcock. Notes, here.
Hitchcock/Warhol 5/4/09 The whole post is repeated below
Andy Warhol, Double Elvis, 1963
A doubled image of a fake cowboy -a movie image- played by a pop "icon," and beneath that of a person: Elvis Aaron Presley.
Two images of an image, of an image, of a man. And an image of psychosis.
Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo, 1958, and Psycho, 1960.
I shouldn't have to point out, but I will, that the spiral image also is from Vertigo.
It amazed me how quickly my annoyance at the YBAs faded the moment my teenage niece in the UK rattled off their names. "Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Antony Gormley, and Damien Hirst. Not to mention Gilbert & George. Which is, to put it bluntly, fucking awesome!" I don't get angry at pop stars; Gilbert and George of course are avowed monarchists.
Fine art has always functioned as part of the social life of money, but the aristocratic arts in the age of capitalism have been defended as philosophy, as if that rendered them something other than complicit. The "unsustainable contradiction" refers more to Fraser than to Hirst, since both represent the nadir of the same school and both make their living proclaiming the seriousness of art, while of the two she seems most committed, while Hirst is torn, as someone who wants to believe his own con. His best work puts that tension right in front.
But the YBAs are the younger siblings of the Pictures Generation, a generation envious of film but wracked by guilt at the indulgence. Not for nothing does their mentor Baldessari call himself "a closet formalist". Formalism: from Greenberg, to Baldessari to Fraser. That's why there was no reference to Hitchcock in the Duchamp catalogue: he's neither an artist nor a philosopher. It's also why Art Forum is now a cross between October and Vogue.
The contradictions of the art market are part and parcel of the art world. If only Nixon could go to China, only oligarchs are capable of making the art world less boring than it is. If Colin de Land was America's answer to Martin Kippenberger, Adam Lindemann is its answer to Maurizio Cattelan.
Shane Ferro has post on Artinfo recapitulating the New York Times’s debate on the art market before migrating to an earlier exchange of views that started here on Art Market Monitor. She quotes Felix Salmon taking me to task for missing that “ prices are quantitatively completely bonkers.”
Ferro adds:
This question — whether paying wild sums for contemporary art signifies a healthy market or not — is where the real debate is.
I can see why the very large sums of money being paid for works of art is startling and unsettling. But I don’t actually think the nominal figure is indicative of whether the market is healthy. A person buying an airplane for their own use at $30 million is no more or less bonkers than buying a work of art for $30m. The plane may seem more substantial but if it costs a lot to maintain, isn’t used often and the same function could be served by . There is no way for economics to measure the value of that purchase to the person.
My comments at Artinfo
Maneker thinks spending 30 million on an artwork is like sending 30 million on a private jet. With a mind like his I wonder if he was working at Bear Stearns.
A $30 million jet, as a luxury item -Warren Buffett's “indefensible”- fitted (let's just say) for 8 people with private bedrooms, a movie theater and rec. room, can be refitted for commercial use as a non-luxury item. A $30 million bauble that cost $300,000 to make is priced based on the desire of a small number of people, a very limited fan base. The question is: how long can it last?
Maneker is happy to stipulate that the price has no relation to long term cultural importance. "The art market isn’t a measure of art historical value or worth." But the bet in speculating on art is that other people in the long run will agree. If they don't you end up losing money, or your kids do. Nahmad is given credit for a great sense of timing, in unloading first Marie Laurencin[!!] and now late Picasso. I doubt he paid that much to pick them up. What's the rule? If someone's selling you should ask why.
Felix Salmon agrees with Gopnik: "The market for art is unlike any other, because it’s built on some notion of true, underlying value."
The market for fine art built on "a notion", and claims of seriousness of purpose. But Gerome, Bouguereau and Winterhalter were vewy, vewy seweous pepew. The stars of the Salon were every bit as serious as the Refusés. I witnessed a somewhat faded art star reminded gently of this fact. He didn't respond.
I don't care about the money, I'm only interested in art. So for me the question is Hirst or Tarantino? Who's the biggest badass white boy on the block?
One year Damien Hirst has a show entitled "No Sense of Absolute Corruption" The next year contradicts himself by covering a skull in diamonds guaranteed not to be blood diamonds. They should have been guaranteed blood diamonds, with certificates of authenticity and the names of dead children engraved on each facet. And all Tarantino did was make a movie with a psychotic Nazi as the hero. "Wait for the cream." Das ist die ewige Kunst.
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I'll add one more comment. I have no argument with anything lcgarllery wrote, but it deserves expansion. He's describing a small, elite market populated by self-interested parties who share also a common enthusiasm for art as such, if specifically the kind of art that can be bought and resold for profit. The 19th and 20th century avant-gardes saw themselves as separating themselves from the past, and from common opinion, but there was the same sense that the makers and audience for the new work were part of the same group. That's both a market model and a social model, and it can work.
But it's a problem now that the "avant-garde" and "respectable" art communities have collapsed into one another. There no tension between starving artists and rich patrons when starving artists are happily currying favor. The result of this is not that new art necessarily is banal, though much of it is, but all of it is weaker.
The model for fine art now is high style and haute couture, as fashion or outré anti-fashion. That's less an attack on the art than on claims to importance. Art objects made today have nowhere near the importance of objects made 400 years ago, because objects themselves are less important. Art journals are closer now to Vogue than to the New York Review of Books or LRB, but there's still the pretense. Jim Hoberman as a film critic is a critic of visual art. The art he reviews has a market model, and one on a much larger scale than the market for fine art, which means that he doesn't hang out much with Hollywood producers. His social world is the world of the audience for art and for some degree also its makers. The funders are elsewhere. Meanwhile art critics who are not openly style critics become parodies. The most important intellectual defender of Gerhard Richter is a Marxist only the art world could produce: who writes catalogue essays for boutiques in 57th St.
Kipling put the problem well. "Every one knows every one else far too well for business purposes."
I have no brief against Koons. If I want to bemoan the state of the world, it's all there. He makes art out of it. But he's not Bernini. To talk seriously about Koons you have to talk about Warhol, and to talk seriously about Warhol you have to talk about Hitchcock. To talk seriously about Gursky you have to talk about Zhang Yimou's opening of the Beijing Olympics. To talk about visual art today you have to be able to talk about Cronenberg's Cosmopolis. Will anything by Matthew Barney outlast "Terminator II"? I doubt it, and I doubt it should.
There's good art in the galleries these days, but most of it isn't made in the US. The Chinese boom reminds me of NY in the 80s, when Larry Gagosian posed for Robert Longo: the dark poetry of capitalism. But Bladerunner came out in 1982, and it will outlast most if not all of the art of that decade. I think recent Chinese work is better too, but I am not going to get my investment advice from Vogue or Elle Decor. A writer for the Economist cited the failure of a Sherrie Levine to crack a million at auction as a sign of trouble. The fact that she chose Levine's work as a model of anything shows how little she understands either art or markets. There's more than one bubble operating here.
Saatchi and Saatchi faced a crisis after all the expansion meant that it handled accounts for both Coke and Pepsi. Art and advertising are boutique businesses. Conglomerates can operate multiple boutiques and brands only as long as they’re diversified, but also a boutique cannot become a conglomerate without losing it’s claim to the “charm” of being a boutique.
As David Zwirner told me 20 years ago, there’s not much difference between art and fashion anymore. I suppose I should have left that as a blind item, but I’m really sick of the cant. High art and high fashion are facing the same crisis; entertainment and clothing are doing fine. If Koons is leaving Gagosian it’s because he wants the comparative safety of the smaller art business. Schnabel to his credit seems to have chosen entertainment (his paintings are now as bad as Matthew Barney’s films). Salle, Longo and Cindy Sherman made films too, all forgotten. But the daughter of two minor art stars of their generation is now an “art house” favorite on cable. HBO is boutique entertainment, a different economic model than the art world. The middle class is more intellectually serious than the rich but moralizing art critics lambaste the new generation of oligarchs for not upholding the standards of the houses of the Medici and the Sforza.
You quote Gopnik: “The market for art is unlike any other, because it’s built on some notion of true, underlying value” I come from a background in the aristocratic arts, but I’m a communist. Go figure. You’re not defending art you’re defending the church.
I’ll ask again: Is Jackson Pollock more important than Alfred Hitchcock?
And I’ll answer: No.
I’ll take art where I can get it, not where it’s supposed to be.
and the second
This is the last time I’ll quote this, even if this time I’ve modified it a bit.
“The market for wine is unlike any other, because it’s built on some notion of true, underlying value.”
As Lindmann would say: De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum.
But to take that seriously that would have to apply to values as well, so the point is not the right and wrong but the argument. Would you rather have an ongoing debate about wines, or follow someone else’s prescriptions? The criticism of Parker’s enological monoculture is longstanding.
Your focus as a finance writer colors and limits your coverage of anything else, and therefore limits your coverage of finance itself.
The last link above is something I meant to write about earlier. Salmon provides a link to the Krugman piece that annoyed Taleb. Hard to exaggerate how smug and stupid it is; and absolutely blind to the violence of what can only be described in human terms as catastrophic change.
For a primer and Daniel Davies and the culture of fragility, start here.
