Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Saint Genet
Jean Paul Sartre
I have been looking for a copy of this since July, when a friend in Paris brought my attention towards Genet. Criminal and author, Genet proves to be a fascinating character, and I would deffinately recommend a copy of this to anyone lucky enough to come across one. Anyways, this week I finally got my hands on one at a used book store here in Toronto.
Strange Hell Of Beauty…
Genet Drifts from the Ethics of Evil to a black aestheticism. The metamorphosis takes place at first without his realizing it: he thinks that he is still living beneath the sun of Satan when a new sun rises: Beauty. This future writer was obviously not spoiled at birth: no “aristic nature,” no “poetic gift.” At the age of fifteen, he dreamt only of doing harm. When he encountered beauty, it was a late revelation, a late-season fruit.
.
.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Peter Voulkos Super Modern Moments
“In 1954, fresh from the eye-opening experimental school Black Mountain College in North Carolina and a residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in his native Montana, Peter Voulkos began teaching at the Los Angeles Country Art Institute. There, he set up a now legendary program in which he and his students, nearly all men, stayed up late, drank a great deal, and made mostly roughly painted, often huge, pots.”
.
Mark Rothko & Ad Reinhardt
Mark Rothko & Ad Reinhardt
Adam Mcewen
In a studio in New York, on an evening in November 1958, Mark Rothko works on a large canvas. In the dimly-lit room, he stands close to the painting, a three inch thick brush in his right hand. His face is close to the canvas. He is peering closely at the wet paint, intently, trying... to lift off a pubic hair which lies moistly in the paint. As he picks at the hair with the tip of the paint brush he sobs gently, the sound coming softly from his chest, wetly from his throat an ebbing rhythm.
Across town, on the same night, at the same time, in another art studio, this one smaller, recently whitewashed, Ad Reinhardt lies on his chest on a bench, his neck craned down torwards a canvas which lies flat on the floor. He pecks repetedly at the surface of the painting with the tip of a finely tipped paintbrush, pecking, at the pubic hair which will not release itself from the paint, and as he does so he cries softly, every now and then wiping his cheek of the tears which hesitate at the rims of his eyes before running freely down.
.
Adam Mcewen
In a studio in New York, on an evening in November 1958, Mark Rothko works on a large canvas. In the dimly-lit room, he stands close to the painting, a three inch thick brush in his right hand. His face is close to the canvas. He is peering closely at the wet paint, intently, trying... to lift off a pubic hair which lies moistly in the paint. As he picks at the hair with the tip of the paint brush he sobs gently, the sound coming softly from his chest, wetly from his throat an ebbing rhythm.
Across town, on the same night, at the same time, in another art studio, this one smaller, recently whitewashed, Ad Reinhardt lies on his chest on a bench, his neck craned down torwards a canvas which lies flat on the floor. He pecks repetedly at the surface of the painting with the tip of a finely tipped paintbrush, pecking, at the pubic hair which will not release itself from the paint, and as he does so he cries softly, every now and then wiping his cheek of the tears which hesitate at the rims of his eyes before running freely down.
.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
An Invitation to Lubberland
There is all sorts of Fowl and Fish,
With Wine and store of Brandy;
Ye have there what your hearts can wish:
The Hills are Sugar-Candy
There is a ship, we understand,
Now riding in the river;
Tis newly come from Lubberland,
The like I think was never;
You that a lazy life do love.
I'd have you now go over,
They say the land is not above
Two thousand leagues from Dover.
The captain and the master too,
Do's give us this relation,
And so do's all the whole ship's crew,
Concerning this strange nation:
"The streets are pav'd with pudding-pies,
nay, powder'd-beef and bacon,
They say they scorn to tell you lies:'
Who thinks it is mistaken.
The king of Knaves, and Queen of Sluts
Reign there in peace and quiet;
You need not fear to starve your guts,
There is such store of dyet:
There may you live free from all care,
Like hogs set up a fat'ning;
The garments which the people wear
Is silver, silk and satin.
The lofty buildings of this place
For many years have lasted;
With nutmegs, pepper, cloves, and mace,
The walls are there rough-cast,
In curious hasty-pudding boil'd,
And most ingenious carving;
Likewise they are with pancakes ty'd,
Sure, here's no fear of starving.
The captain says, "In every town,
Hot roasted pigs will meet ye,
They in the streets run up and down,
Still crying out, Come eat me"
Likewise, he says, "At every feast,
The very fowls and fishes,
Nay from the biggest to the least,
Comes tumbling to the dishes.
"The rivers run with claret fine,
The brooks with rich canary,
The ponds with other sorts of wine,
To make your hearts full merry:
Nay, more than this, you may behold,
The fountains flow with brandy,
The rocks are like refined gold,
The hills are sugar candy.
"Rose-water is the rain they have,
Which comes in pleasant showers,
All places are adorned brave,
With sweet and fragrant flowers.
Hot custards grows on ev'ry tree,
Each ditch affords rich jellies;
Now if you will be ruled by me,
Go there and fill your bellies.
"There's nothing there but holy-days
With music out of measure;
Who can forbear to speak the praise
Of such a land of pleasure?
There may you lead a lazy life
Free from all kind of labours:
And he that is without a wife,
May borrow of his neighbour.
"There is no law nor lawyer's fees
All men are free from fury,
For ev'ry one do's what he please,
Without a judge or jury:
The summer-time is warm they say,
The winter's ne'er the colder,
They have no landlords' rent to pay
Each man is a free-holder."
You that are free to cross the seas
Make no more disputation:
In Lubber-land you'll live at ease,
With pleasant recreation:
The Captain waits but for a gale
Of prosperous wind and weather,
And then they soon will hoist up sail,
Make haste away together.''
With Wine and store of Brandy;
Ye have there what your hearts can wish:
The Hills are Sugar-Candy
There is a ship, we understand,
Now riding in the river;
Tis newly come from Lubberland,
The like I think was never;
You that a lazy life do love.
I'd have you now go over,
They say the land is not above
Two thousand leagues from Dover.
The captain and the master too,
Do's give us this relation,
And so do's all the whole ship's crew,
Concerning this strange nation:
"The streets are pav'd with pudding-pies,
nay, powder'd-beef and bacon,
They say they scorn to tell you lies:'
Who thinks it is mistaken.
The king of Knaves, and Queen of Sluts
Reign there in peace and quiet;
You need not fear to starve your guts,
There is such store of dyet:
There may you live free from all care,
Like hogs set up a fat'ning;
The garments which the people wear
Is silver, silk and satin.
The lofty buildings of this place
For many years have lasted;
With nutmegs, pepper, cloves, and mace,
The walls are there rough-cast,
In curious hasty-pudding boil'd,
And most ingenious carving;
Likewise they are with pancakes ty'd,
Sure, here's no fear of starving.
The captain says, "In every town,
Hot roasted pigs will meet ye,
They in the streets run up and down,
Still crying out, Come eat me"
Likewise, he says, "At every feast,
The very fowls and fishes,
Nay from the biggest to the least,
Comes tumbling to the dishes.
"The rivers run with claret fine,
The brooks with rich canary,
The ponds with other sorts of wine,
To make your hearts full merry:
Nay, more than this, you may behold,
The fountains flow with brandy,
The rocks are like refined gold,
The hills are sugar candy.
"Rose-water is the rain they have,
Which comes in pleasant showers,
All places are adorned brave,
With sweet and fragrant flowers.
Hot custards grows on ev'ry tree,
Each ditch affords rich jellies;
Now if you will be ruled by me,
Go there and fill your bellies.
"There's nothing there but holy-days
With music out of measure;
Who can forbear to speak the praise
Of such a land of pleasure?
There may you lead a lazy life
Free from all kind of labours:
And he that is without a wife,
May borrow of his neighbour.
"There is no law nor lawyer's fees
All men are free from fury,
For ev'ry one do's what he please,
Without a judge or jury:
The summer-time is warm they say,
The winter's ne'er the colder,
They have no landlords' rent to pay
Each man is a free-holder."
You that are free to cross the seas
Make no more disputation:
In Lubber-land you'll live at ease,
With pleasant recreation:
The Captain waits but for a gale
Of prosperous wind and weather,
And then they soon will hoist up sail,
Make haste away together.''
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
DANIEL BAUMANN on CADDY NOLAND
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
James V. Werner - American Flaneur
A nice extention on Benjamin's epic Arcade Project. Expect more on the Flauner in the next little while!
From the dust cover....
American Flaneur investigates the connections between Edgar A. Poe and the nineteenth-century flaneur - or strolling urban observer - suggested in Walter Benjamin's discussion of Baudelaire. This study illustrates the centrality of the flaneur to Poe's literary aims, and uses the flaneur to illuminate Poe's intimate yet ambivalent relationship to his surrounding culture.
While James V. Werner concentrates on Poe's fiction, this book treats many areas of nineteenth-century intellectual and popular culture, including science and pseudo-science, the American magazine marketplace, urban topology, the grotesque, labyrinths, narratives of exploration and discovery, and cosmological treatises. Werner draws on Marxist, reader response and periodical theories while reconstructing Poe through examinations of ephemeral texts of the time.
PDF HERE.
Paul Virilio, "Bunker Archaeology"
Brutalism at its best!
Virilos "Bunker Archaeology" is an absolute must, provided in full .pdf for your convience! Even if you never get around to reading the text, the incredibly haunting photos make it well worth the download!
From the dust cover...
Out of print for almost a decade we are thrilled to bring back one of our most requested hard-to-find titles—philosopher and cultural theorist Paul Virilio's Bunker Archeology. In 1994 we published the first English-language translation of the classic French edition of 1975 which accompanied an exhibition of Virilio's photographs at the Centre Pompidou. In Bunker Archeology urbanist Paul Virilio turns his attention—and camera—to the ominous yet strangely compelling German bunkers that lie abandoned along the coast of France. These ghostly reminders of destruction and oppression prompted Virilio to consider the nature of war and existence in relation to both World War II and contemporary times. Virilio discusses fortresses and military space in general as well as the bunkers themselves including an examination of the role of Albert Speer Hitler's architect in the rise of the Third Reich.
Download Here
Virilos "Bunker Archaeology" is an absolute must, provided in full .pdf for your convience! Even if you never get around to reading the text, the incredibly haunting photos make it well worth the download!
From the dust cover...
Out of print for almost a decade we are thrilled to bring back one of our most requested hard-to-find titles—philosopher and cultural theorist Paul Virilio's Bunker Archeology. In 1994 we published the first English-language translation of the classic French edition of 1975 which accompanied an exhibition of Virilio's photographs at the Centre Pompidou. In Bunker Archeology urbanist Paul Virilio turns his attention—and camera—to the ominous yet strangely compelling German bunkers that lie abandoned along the coast of France. These ghostly reminders of destruction and oppression prompted Virilio to consider the nature of war and existence in relation to both World War II and contemporary times. Virilio discusses fortresses and military space in general as well as the bunkers themselves including an examination of the role of Albert Speer Hitler's architect in the rise of the Third Reich.
Download Here
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
"what remained of a Rembrant torn into small, very regular squares and rammed down the shithole"
The Use of Free Time
Sitationist International 1961
The most superficial and constantly reiterated platitude of leftish sociologists during recent years is that leisure has become a major factor in advanced capitalist society. This platitude is the basis of countless debates for or against the importance of a reformist rise in the standard of living, or of workers' participation in the prevailing values of the society into which they are becoming increasingly integrated. What is counterrevolutionary about all this verbiage is that it equates free time with passive consumption, as if the only use of free time was the opportunity to become an increasingly full-time spectator of the established absurdities. The illusions manifested in a particularly ponderous symposium of these sociologists (Arguments #12-13) were soundly refuted in two articles in Socialisme ou Barbarie #27. In the first, Pierre Canjuers wrote: "While modern capitalism constantly develops new needs in order to increase consumption, people's dissatisfaction remains the same as ever. Their lives no longer have any meaning beyond a rush to consume, and this consumption is used to justify the increasingly radical frustration of any creative activity or genuine human initiative — to the point that people no longer even see this lack of meaning as important." In the second article, Jean Delvaux noted that the issue of consumption has not superseded the qualitative distinction between the poor and the wealthy (four out of five wage workers still have to constantly struggle to make ends meet). More significantly, he pointed out that there is no reason to worry about whether or not the proletariat participates in the prevailing social or cultural values, because "there no longer are any such values." And he added the essential point that the present culture, "increasingly separated from society and from people's lives (painters painting for other painters, novelists writing novels read only by other novelists about the impossibility of writing a novel) — this culture, insofar as it has any originality, is no longer anything but a constant self-denunciation: a denunciation of the society and a rage against culture itself."
Sitationist International 1961
The most superficial and constantly reiterated platitude of leftish sociologists during recent years is that leisure has become a major factor in advanced capitalist society. This platitude is the basis of countless debates for or against the importance of a reformist rise in the standard of living, or of workers' participation in the prevailing values of the society into which they are becoming increasingly integrated. What is counterrevolutionary about all this verbiage is that it equates free time with passive consumption, as if the only use of free time was the opportunity to become an increasingly full-time spectator of the established absurdities. The illusions manifested in a particularly ponderous symposium of these sociologists (Arguments #12-13) were soundly refuted in two articles in Socialisme ou Barbarie #27. In the first, Pierre Canjuers wrote: "While modern capitalism constantly develops new needs in order to increase consumption, people's dissatisfaction remains the same as ever. Their lives no longer have any meaning beyond a rush to consume, and this consumption is used to justify the increasingly radical frustration of any creative activity or genuine human initiative — to the point that people no longer even see this lack of meaning as important." In the second article, Jean Delvaux noted that the issue of consumption has not superseded the qualitative distinction between the poor and the wealthy (four out of five wage workers still have to constantly struggle to make ends meet). More significantly, he pointed out that there is no reason to worry about whether or not the proletariat participates in the prevailing social or cultural values, because "there no longer are any such values." And he added the essential point that the present culture, "increasingly separated from society and from people's lives (painters painting for other painters, novelists writing novels read only by other novelists about the impossibility of writing a novel) — this culture, insofar as it has any originality, is no longer anything but a constant self-denunciation: a denunciation of the society and a rage against culture itself."
The emptiness of leisure stems from the emptiness of life in present-day society, and it cannot be filled within the framework of that society. This emptiness is simultaneously expressed and concealed by the entire cultural spectacle, in three basic forms.
The "classic" form of culture continues to exist, whether reproduced in its pure form or in latter-day imitations (tragic theater, for example, or bourgeois politeness). Secondly, there are the countless degraded spectacular representations through which the prevailing society presents itself to the exploited in order to mystify them (televised sports, virtually all films and novels, advertising, the automobile as status symbol). Finally, there is an avant-garde negation of the spectacle, a negation which is often unconscious of its basis but which is the only "original" aspect of present-day culture. The "rage against culture" expressed within this latter form ends up arriving at the same indifference that proletarians as a class have toward all the forms of spectacular culture. Until the spectacle itself has been negated, any audience watching the negation of the spectacle can no longer be distinguished from that suspect and unhappy audience consisting of isolated artists and intellectuals. When the revolutionary proletariat manifests itself as such, it will not be as a new audience for some new spectacle, but as people actively participating in every aspect of their lives.
There is no revolutionary problem of leisure — of an emptiness to be filled — but a problem of free time. As we have already said: "There can be no free use of time until we possess the modern tools for the construction of everyday life. The use of such tools will mark the leap from a utopian revolutionary art to an experimental revolutionary art" (Debord, "Theses on Cultural Revolution," Internationale Situationniste #1). The supersession of leisure through the development of an activity of free creation-consumption can only be understood in relation with the dissolution of the traditional arts — with their transformation into superior modes of action which do not refuse or abolish art, but fulfill it. In this way art will be superseded, conserved and surmounted within a more complex activity. Its traditional elements may still be partially present, but transformed, integrated and modified by the totality.
Previous avant-garde movements presented themselves by declaring the excellence of their methods and principles, which were to be immediately judged on the basis of their works. The SI is the first artistic organization to base itself on the radical inadequacy of all permissible works; and whose significance, and whose success or failure, will be able to be judged only with the revolutionary praxis of its time.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Crowds and Power
Elias Canetti
Canetti's Crowds and Power is probably one of the single best essays I have ever read. It took him something like 21 years to write and won him the nobel prize in 1981. I am always completely blown away when I go into a book store and pretty much every clerk just scratches their head when asked if they happen to have a copy in stock. (look at the wikipedia article for christ sake HERE)
It runs some 469 pages so there is no way i will be scanning the whole thing, however here is the first six pages to get you interested.
Elias Canetti
Canetti's Crowds and Power is probably one of the single best essays I have ever read. It took him something like 21 years to write and won him the nobel prize in 1981. I am always completely blown away when I go into a book store and pretty much every clerk just scratches their head when asked if they happen to have a copy in stock. (look at the wikipedia article for christ sake HERE)
It runs some 469 pages so there is no way i will be scanning the whole thing, however here is the first six pages to get you interested.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
BLACK NOISE
Electrophilia was a side project by Steven Parrino And Jutta Koether. This shit is super hard to find on the internet, so if anyone out there has any more of it i would really appreceiate a heads up.
RAPE YOUR EARS TWICE!
CLICK CLICK CLICK
this second file is a mix I found online. I had the track listing then I closed the tab and now i can't seem to find it again anywhere. Its got some Weirding way, Jutta Koether and Electrophilia with vocals from Gang Gang's Lizzy Bougatsos.
CLICK CLICK CLICK
.
HEARING THE SCREAM GREY BUZZ
Micheal Ondaatje
From Billy The Kid
WHITE WALLS NEON ON THE EYE
1880 NOVEMBER 23 MY BIRTHDAY
CATCHING FLIES WITH MY LEFT HAND
BRINGING THE FIRST TO MY EAR
HEARING THE SCREAM GREY BUZZ
AS THEIR LEGS CRAMP THEIR
HEADS WITH NO AIR
SO EYES SPLIT AND RELEASE
OPEN FINGERS
THE AIR AND SUN HIT THEM LIKE POLLEN
SUN FLOOD DRYING THEM RED
CATHCING FLIES
ANGRY WEATHER IN MY HEAD, TOO
.
From Billy The Kid
1880 NOVEMBER 23 MY BIRTHDAY
CATCHING FLIES WITH MY LEFT HAND
BRINGING THE FIRST TO MY EAR
HEARING THE SCREAM GREY BUZZ
AS THEIR LEGS CRAMP THEIR
HEADS WITH NO AIR
SO EYES SPLIT AND RELEASE
OPEN FINGERS
THE AIR AND SUN HIT THEM LIKE POLLEN
SUN FLOOD DRYING THEM RED
CATHCING FLIES
ANGRY WEATHER IN MY HEAD, TOO
.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
You Just Don't Get It Dad, So Fuck Off!
Gardar Eide Einarsson
One of the classical headaches for "alternative" (avant-garde) practices has been how to avoid seeing these practices co-opted by more (commercial) mainstream forces, in order to be remarketed to a new audience/consumer group, a strategy of emulation that seems to serve a double purpose for the institution: continuing the late capitalist quest for newness while at the same time making the original discourses and practices less functional as tools for articulating critique.
The institutional threshold of pain is continually raised as institution(s) comes to want a certain transgressive critical naughtiness every now and then, and a significant amount of work is produced that thrives on this expectation, feigning a critical attitude while operating safely within the framework of the institutional (mobile) status quo. Rather than introducing significantly other values into the institutional artworld this work has a tendency to reconfirm the at core conservative values of this hermetic system, servicing it in a more or less conscious way.
In the corporate world one has long been aware of how knowledge and information can be understood as a commodity to be protected and traded - corporations now monitor discourses in and around "cutting edge" cultural production, and are willing to go to great lengths to tap into the know-how that can be accessed from these discourses. As market research firm Sputnik writes: "The most obvious link to the future is to uncover the trends, the cultural or social movements that are brewing- not what is oversaturated and noticeable everywhere today. "[1]. In the corporate world establishing relationships with (and often funding) "alternative" and "critical" practices is a time tested method of gaining this kind of access.
These strategies have of course been adopted within the field of cultural production itself, with larger institutions and art-world powerbrokers scanning the field of "alternative" practices for raw material that can be harnessed to serve the interests of the institutions and their benefactors. (Not only giving the curators employed at these institutions credibility through their being hip to contemporary discourses, but by extension making the institution more attractive to potential funders who might buy this Schein of updated-ness and see the institution as a way to access otherwise underground scenes.)
Examples of these processes of parasitation abound, from the "First Tuesday"- inspired corporate executive -cultural worker dating services described in Anthony Davis and Simon Fords text Culture Clubs [2], through the mock fanzines created by companies such as Nike, Warner Records and Urban Outfitters -who use the underground aesthetics of zines to communicate with a more and more sophisticated group of consumers suspicious of "big business"-[3], to Tate Moderns attempt to co-opt Infopool pamphlets for the show Century City [4].
One of the problems of trying to maintain a critical practice then, is how one should react/relate to these mechanisms of parasitation on, and of mainstream repackaging and reselling of, alternative initiatives. To what extent should a lesson be learnt from corporate treatment of discourses and the knowledge inherent in them as commodities, and a counter-tactic be devised to protect these commodities from being adopted and/or perverted by outside forces?
An example of a highly developed sense of protectionist strategies is to be found in the martial arts world. Here information [discourse] is in a very practical way seen as a weapon and is often circulated only within a select group, the logic being that the exclusivity of the fighting technique gives its practitioners an upper hand on potential enemies. (When asked by the L.A. Sheriffs office to teach police officers the legendary underground fighting style of 52 Blocks- supposedly originating from Brooklyn-based gangs incarcerated at Rikers Island in the seventies -outlaw martial arts scholar Dennis Newsome replied: "I ain't teaching you shit. You know why? I know how you gonna twist it." [5])
With lessons drawn both from artists who have been more or less bypassed by history (often times as the direct result of co-optation of their practices by other artists/cultural workers) and from recent experiences of attacks on, and infiltration of, political protest initiatives, many of those involved in alternative/oppositional cultural practices now seem to move towards similar strategies of closed circulation.
However in many cases the most interesting initiatives are driven maybe less by an idea of a conscious protection against or antagonism towards the institution(s) that so wants to incorporate or co-opt them (although that in many cases does play a part) and more by a mere disinterest in taking part within the framework of these institutions. Rather than rebelling against the institution while still entertaining the idea that the institution is the main framework for the presentation of the work ("…in the positivity of the negative perhaps, but also in the nothingness of the positivity."[6]), these initiatives seem to just stay clear of the institution based on a realisation that it does not really have all that much to offer- or at least not in every field- and that there is no reason to bother with it unless there is actually something to be gained from it.
Examples of similar strategies of consciously choosing to steering clear or on the side of mainstream forces are to be found successfully within smaller specialised music scenes (hardcore, black metal, industrial music etc.) as well as in other industries where the idea of "street cred" is valued (such as skateboarding, surfing, to a certain extent snowboarding and certain forms of fashion). Contrary to many experiments in alternativity and self-sustained systems carried out in the contemporary art world, these initiatives have managed not only to build but in fact to sustain over long periods of time a functioning platform outside of the mainstream parts of their industries, remaining in control of the production and distribution of their own output. Often the different interest based initiatives that dominate these industries (or sub-industries) are connected in a system of collaborations and mutual benefit switching on and off and taking different shapes at different times, forming what Manuel De Landa describes as a meshwork situation- a rhizomatic, non linear quasi-grid of interconnection [7].
Indeed it might here be of some interest to invoke the tired and admittedly often rather shady concept of the division between alternative and oppositional (?). Rather than flagging themselves as explicitly oppositional these practices seem to step outside of and reject the idea of counter strategies happening within the system, opting instead to build their own alternative outside of it.
The institution of the artworld is of course a relatively amorphous entity (or collection of entities) and operating completely outside of every part of this system in every part of one's production might not be very easy (if that production is still to function as art), or indeed very desirable. What seems to be desirable however is to stop perceiving of one's function as an artist as being always bound up in this system, always having to relate to the traditional idea of the artworld and always having to position the critique of this system squarely within that very same system.
Notes:
[1] Janine Lopiano-Misdom & Joanne De Luca, Street Trends; How Today's Alternative Youth Cultures are Creating Tomorrow's Mainstream Markets, Harper Business 1997
[2] (2) Anthony Davis & Simon Ford, Culture Clubs, 2000,
[3] Stephen Duncombe, DIY Nike Style: Zines and the Corporate World, 1999,
[4] For more information see Operation Re-appropriation, www.infopool.org.uk
[5] Douglas Century, Ghetto Blasters, Details, August 2001
[6] Jean-Francois Lyotard, Energumen Capitalism, Hatred of Capitalism, Semiotext(e), New York, 2001
[7] See for example Manuel De Landa, Netzwerke/Meshrooms,Benteli Verlags AG, Bern, 1995
Gardar Eide Einarsson
One of the classical headaches for "alternative" (avant-garde) practices has been how to avoid seeing these practices co-opted by more (commercial) mainstream forces, in order to be remarketed to a new audience/consumer group, a strategy of emulation that seems to serve a double purpose for the institution: continuing the late capitalist quest for newness while at the same time making the original discourses and practices less functional as tools for articulating critique.
The institutional threshold of pain is continually raised as institution(s) comes to want a certain transgressive critical naughtiness every now and then, and a significant amount of work is produced that thrives on this expectation, feigning a critical attitude while operating safely within the framework of the institutional (mobile) status quo. Rather than introducing significantly other values into the institutional artworld this work has a tendency to reconfirm the at core conservative values of this hermetic system, servicing it in a more or less conscious way.
In the corporate world one has long been aware of how knowledge and information can be understood as a commodity to be protected and traded - corporations now monitor discourses in and around "cutting edge" cultural production, and are willing to go to great lengths to tap into the know-how that can be accessed from these discourses. As market research firm Sputnik writes: "The most obvious link to the future is to uncover the trends, the cultural or social movements that are brewing- not what is oversaturated and noticeable everywhere today. "[1]. In the corporate world establishing relationships with (and often funding) "alternative" and "critical" practices is a time tested method of gaining this kind of access.
These strategies have of course been adopted within the field of cultural production itself, with larger institutions and art-world powerbrokers scanning the field of "alternative" practices for raw material that can be harnessed to serve the interests of the institutions and their benefactors. (Not only giving the curators employed at these institutions credibility through their being hip to contemporary discourses, but by extension making the institution more attractive to potential funders who might buy this Schein of updated-ness and see the institution as a way to access otherwise underground scenes.)
Examples of these processes of parasitation abound, from the "First Tuesday"- inspired corporate executive -cultural worker dating services described in Anthony Davis and Simon Fords text Culture Clubs [2], through the mock fanzines created by companies such as Nike, Warner Records and Urban Outfitters -who use the underground aesthetics of zines to communicate with a more and more sophisticated group of consumers suspicious of "big business"-[3], to Tate Moderns attempt to co-opt Infopool pamphlets for the show Century City [4].
One of the problems of trying to maintain a critical practice then, is how one should react/relate to these mechanisms of parasitation on, and of mainstream repackaging and reselling of, alternative initiatives. To what extent should a lesson be learnt from corporate treatment of discourses and the knowledge inherent in them as commodities, and a counter-tactic be devised to protect these commodities from being adopted and/or perverted by outside forces?
An example of a highly developed sense of protectionist strategies is to be found in the martial arts world. Here information [discourse] is in a very practical way seen as a weapon and is often circulated only within a select group, the logic being that the exclusivity of the fighting technique gives its practitioners an upper hand on potential enemies. (When asked by the L.A. Sheriffs office to teach police officers the legendary underground fighting style of 52 Blocks- supposedly originating from Brooklyn-based gangs incarcerated at Rikers Island in the seventies -outlaw martial arts scholar Dennis Newsome replied: "I ain't teaching you shit. You know why? I know how you gonna twist it." [5])
With lessons drawn both from artists who have been more or less bypassed by history (often times as the direct result of co-optation of their practices by other artists/cultural workers) and from recent experiences of attacks on, and infiltration of, political protest initiatives, many of those involved in alternative/oppositional cultural practices now seem to move towards similar strategies of closed circulation.
However in many cases the most interesting initiatives are driven maybe less by an idea of a conscious protection against or antagonism towards the institution(s) that so wants to incorporate or co-opt them (although that in many cases does play a part) and more by a mere disinterest in taking part within the framework of these institutions. Rather than rebelling against the institution while still entertaining the idea that the institution is the main framework for the presentation of the work ("…in the positivity of the negative perhaps, but also in the nothingness of the positivity."[6]), these initiatives seem to just stay clear of the institution based on a realisation that it does not really have all that much to offer- or at least not in every field- and that there is no reason to bother with it unless there is actually something to be gained from it.
Examples of similar strategies of consciously choosing to steering clear or on the side of mainstream forces are to be found successfully within smaller specialised music scenes (hardcore, black metal, industrial music etc.) as well as in other industries where the idea of "street cred" is valued (such as skateboarding, surfing, to a certain extent snowboarding and certain forms of fashion). Contrary to many experiments in alternativity and self-sustained systems carried out in the contemporary art world, these initiatives have managed not only to build but in fact to sustain over long periods of time a functioning platform outside of the mainstream parts of their industries, remaining in control of the production and distribution of their own output. Often the different interest based initiatives that dominate these industries (or sub-industries) are connected in a system of collaborations and mutual benefit switching on and off and taking different shapes at different times, forming what Manuel De Landa describes as a meshwork situation- a rhizomatic, non linear quasi-grid of interconnection [7].
Indeed it might here be of some interest to invoke the tired and admittedly often rather shady concept of the division between alternative and oppositional (?). Rather than flagging themselves as explicitly oppositional these practices seem to step outside of and reject the idea of counter strategies happening within the system, opting instead to build their own alternative outside of it.
The institution of the artworld is of course a relatively amorphous entity (or collection of entities) and operating completely outside of every part of this system in every part of one's production might not be very easy (if that production is still to function as art), or indeed very desirable. What seems to be desirable however is to stop perceiving of one's function as an artist as being always bound up in this system, always having to relate to the traditional idea of the artworld and always having to position the critique of this system squarely within that very same system.
Notes:
[1] Janine Lopiano-Misdom & Joanne De Luca, Street Trends; How Today's Alternative Youth Cultures are Creating Tomorrow's Mainstream Markets, Harper Business 1997
[2] (2) Anthony Davis & Simon Ford, Culture Clubs, 2000,
[3] Stephen Duncombe, DIY Nike Style: Zines and the Corporate World, 1999,
[4] For more information see Operation Re-appropriation, www.infopool.org.uk
[5] Douglas Century, Ghetto Blasters, Details, August 2001
[6] Jean-Francois Lyotard, Energumen Capitalism, Hatred of Capitalism, Semiotext(e), New York, 2001
[7] See for example Manuel De Landa, Netzwerke/Meshrooms,Benteli Verlags AG, Bern, 1995
NOTHING DOING
My new pal Justin B. Williams put me onto this one. It's swell and kind of reads like a weird Larry Wiener.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
classic rocks
Frank Stella.
Robert Rauschenberg, left Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham, right.
Formalist fuck-ups. Failed iterations. Etymology excised. Faux-tech. Dreading the new semester. Leering at the minimalists. Drunk on Public Art. Molesting the Post-structuralists. Heaving up conceptualism.
Dan GrahamVanDamme. Laurence OscarMeyerWeiner. Frank StellaEllaOla. Piero Maserati. Pet Peeves Klein. John Cageless. Clement SmokeGreenberg. Off Kawara. Yoko NoNo. Raygun Johnson.
Double Dutch serves as a simultaneous descriptor and refutation for the newest collection of work by Liam Crockard, Ben Schumacher and Hugh Scott-Douglas. Created specifically for Scott Projects, Double Dutch implies both the form of play as with three players and a jump rope, and the expression of dismay conveyed by the popular idiom. Observing the work under this guise, a number of crucial questions begin to arise surrounding the framing, materiality and distribution of the present-day readymade and its extensions. Crockard, Scott-Douglas and Schumacher all work from mass produced objects with few reservations for wholesale appropriation or subversion. This implicates everyone: reflecting the unscrupulous tendency amongst younger generations to draw from any and all sources, Double Dutch suggests linkages that may extend beyond their component parts.
Liam Crockard's collage work often employs disorienting silhouettes and landscapes, which defy seamlessness and favor form over coherent narrative readings, though an alternating sense of displacement and scrutiny arises in the work's installation as well as questions surrounding the formalities of exhibition and the materiality of rough studio practice . One might consider a continuation of these dichotomies between formal and gestural practice embodied in Hugh Scott-Douglas' painting and collage. Can a critique and and empty gesture co-exist? How does one negotiate a product for negation? Scott-Douglas engages and abuses the reified gestures of subversive art practice, equally longing for the return of their auratic power and wishing them dead. Ben Schumacher's work takes up the possibility of a legitimate embrace of the once disruptive Readymade in the information age. Physical presence and participation are taken up in their most immediate form - the online RSVP - and translated into emblematic, permanent objects. Questions of skill and labour remain crucial in Schumacher's work, but are strong components of both Crockard and Scott-Douglas' approaches as well. Ultimately what sits at the core of Double Dutch are a series of these dichotomies - deskilling and the readymade, subversion and the hollow gesture and studio and exhibition practices amongst others - which come to reflect something of the climate for art making today. Crockard, Scott-Douglas and Schumacher are not being prescriptive with their work about the way things are. Instead, they prefer to ask questions, make comparisons, and settle somewhere between jump rope and an idiom.
Written by Liam Crockard.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Michele Cone and Cady Noland in Interview
This is stupid long but i love Cady Noland so i am going to post the whole text anyways.
Michèle Cone: Practically every piece I have seen of yours in group shows or in your one-person shows projects a sense of violence, via signs of confinement — enclosures, gates, boxes, or the aftermath of accident, murder, fighting, boxing, or as in your recent cut-out and pop-up pieces — bullet holes.
Cady Noland: Violence used to be part of life in America and had a positive reputation. Apparently, at least according to Lewis Coser who was writing about the transition of sociology in relation to violence, at a certain point violence used to describe sociology in a very positive way. There was a kind of righteousness about violence — the break with England, fighting for our rights, the Boston Tea Party. Now, in our culture as it is, there is one official social norm — and acts of violence, expressions of dissatisfaction are framed in an atomized view as being "abnormal."
Cone: There are clear references to extreme cases of violence in the United States, Lincoln and Booth, Kennedy and Oswald, Patricia Hearst, etc. . . .
Noland: In the United States at present we don't have a "language of dissension." You might say people visit their frustrations on other individuals and that acts as a type of "safety valve" to "have steam let off." People may complain about "all of the violence there is today," but if there weren't these more individual forms of venting, there would more likely be rioters or committees expressing dissatisfaction in a more collective way. Violence has always been around. The seeming randomness of it now actually indicates the lack of political organization representing different interests. "Inalienable rights" become something so inane that they break down into men believing that they have the right to be superior to women (there's someone lower on the ladder than they) so if a woman won't dare them any more they have a right to murder them. It's called the peace in the feud. In this fashion, hostility and envy are vented without threatening the structures of society. MC: In some of your pieces — like Celebrity Trash — which spill over the floor, the violence is implied in the "trashing" gesture, whereas in your two-dimensional works, the violence is connoted by the title or the historic reference or simply by a word like "Texas."
Noland: When I was making Celebrity Trash I was reading The Globe and The Star and saw that what is done is that you consume all of these celebrities each week, then you turn them into trash. This trashing helps to dampen people's anger over their situation or their own place in the hierarchy of importance. The word "Texas" has a kind of cultural capital. It is shorthand for Kennedy's assassination and for a certain time in the 1960s. Speaking on a financial level, it's interesting how once a certain amount of capital has been invested in a rock group, for example, certain recordings can be dressed up or recontextualized opportunistically to take advantage of a new "trend" or something new it can be attached to. It can be squeezed like a lemon, but it becomes almost an organic thing and it gets revived and squeezed again. I read in a trashy novel once something which implied that the deaths of certain rock stars might have meant more capital for record company and that there are speculations that a few deaths might have been "arranged.
Cone: In the Lincoln pieces with images and writings on sheets of metal, the text you chose, the photographs of Lincoln's clothes, the deathbed without Lincoln in it, muffle the violent subject matter. Your violence is muted. It is not as expressionistic and loud.
Noland: It does not threaten anyone. There is a method in my work which has taken a pathological trend. From the point at which I was making work out of objects I became interested in how, actually, under which circumstances people treat other people like objects. I became interested in psychopaths in particular, because they objectify people in order to manipulate them. By extension they represent the extreme embodiment of a culture's proclivities; so psychopathic behavior provides useful highlighted models to use in search of cultural norms. As does celebrity . . . I remember reading several interviews with Paul Newman where he talks about being treated like an object. Strangers want to walk up to him and prod him, vent feelings on him and knock on his surface to find out "who's home." When I think about celebrity that way I often think about Allan McCollum's surrogates, particularly the black and white plaster pictures.
Cone: How do you tie together psychopathic behavior with the way you work?
Noland: The way I put my work together is a type of inventiveness that is almost the kind of hostile throwaway you encounter often in horror films. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, those people who do meatpacking in some backwater ingrown town, they murder, slaughter and butcher people the way they would animals. They take the body of a person and whack him onto a meat hook on the wall, and somebody else they fold into a square and smash him into a freezer. It's an extreme case of treating people like objects, and it has this throwaway inventiveness.
Cone: Like a gag?
Noland: An adolescent walks down the street with a couple of friends eating an ice cream cone and suddenly smashes it into the coin return slot of a pay phone. It's a nihilistic, negative, gratuitous thing, not functional. It does not facilitate anything, yet it's a pleasure to make the thing function in this other way. I like using objects in the original sense, letting objects be what they are.
Cone: But you are attracted to objects which have a lot of cultural meaning packed in them?
Noland: Yes, but I also like anonymous kinds of things. To treat objects like objects is to do something to them — which is not to say necessarily to transform them — which implies a kind of ascendancy or positive motion forward. This would be a modern movement. What I'm describing is not postmodern either, though. That implies a kind of faith in various styles.
Cone: Still, even anonymous kinds of things are made of certain materials with definite associations. Like the metal of your walkers connotes coldness, even coldbloodedness, when it its thought about in the context of violence that your work deals with.
Noland: About the metal: the use of it is sometimes hierarchical — to use chrome one place and galvanized aluminum in another is to describe relative relationships to it. The coolness might infer dissociation, but the mirror effect in some places is to draw you back in after the dissociation.
Cone: So in effect you do not agree with Alain Robbe-Grillet, saying "Now the world is neither meaningful nor absurd, it just is," nor with Baudrillard's apocalyptic nihilism. You'd rather say the world is full of signs whose meanings are transient, changing and relative?
Noland: The co-option of Baudrillard into art lingo seems so lame. If you have to ask, "emptied of meaning" for whom? What happened to the notion of relativity? This refracted concept of a society was what Emile Durkheim first traced as a model and which Weber later disputed and redirected by addressing relativity: Even if there is one set of goals within a society deemed desirable to obtain — there is certain to be differentiated access to it for different groups within that society; and where one group may be positively directed with institutionally and constitutionally easy access to those goals, another group may have to try to attain those goals through other channels, in ways which are actually "against the law." To dream up a society in which all things have been emptied of meaning is to aver in the end that there exist no class distinctions in that class — an irresponsible representation.
.
Michèle Cone: Practically every piece I have seen of yours in group shows or in your one-person shows projects a sense of violence, via signs of confinement — enclosures, gates, boxes, or the aftermath of accident, murder, fighting, boxing, or as in your recent cut-out and pop-up pieces — bullet holes.
Cady Noland: Violence used to be part of life in America and had a positive reputation. Apparently, at least according to Lewis Coser who was writing about the transition of sociology in relation to violence, at a certain point violence used to describe sociology in a very positive way. There was a kind of righteousness about violence — the break with England, fighting for our rights, the Boston Tea Party. Now, in our culture as it is, there is one official social norm — and acts of violence, expressions of dissatisfaction are framed in an atomized view as being "abnormal."
Cone: There are clear references to extreme cases of violence in the United States, Lincoln and Booth, Kennedy and Oswald, Patricia Hearst, etc. . . .
Noland: In the United States at present we don't have a "language of dissension." You might say people visit their frustrations on other individuals and that acts as a type of "safety valve" to "have steam let off." People may complain about "all of the violence there is today," but if there weren't these more individual forms of venting, there would more likely be rioters or committees expressing dissatisfaction in a more collective way. Violence has always been around. The seeming randomness of it now actually indicates the lack of political organization representing different interests. "Inalienable rights" become something so inane that they break down into men believing that they have the right to be superior to women (there's someone lower on the ladder than they) so if a woman won't dare them any more they have a right to murder them. It's called the peace in the feud. In this fashion, hostility and envy are vented without threatening the structures of society. MC: In some of your pieces — like Celebrity Trash — which spill over the floor, the violence is implied in the "trashing" gesture, whereas in your two-dimensional works, the violence is connoted by the title or the historic reference or simply by a word like "Texas."
Noland: When I was making Celebrity Trash I was reading The Globe and The Star and saw that what is done is that you consume all of these celebrities each week, then you turn them into trash. This trashing helps to dampen people's anger over their situation or their own place in the hierarchy of importance. The word "Texas" has a kind of cultural capital. It is shorthand for Kennedy's assassination and for a certain time in the 1960s. Speaking on a financial level, it's interesting how once a certain amount of capital has been invested in a rock group, for example, certain recordings can be dressed up or recontextualized opportunistically to take advantage of a new "trend" or something new it can be attached to. It can be squeezed like a lemon, but it becomes almost an organic thing and it gets revived and squeezed again. I read in a trashy novel once something which implied that the deaths of certain rock stars might have meant more capital for record company and that there are speculations that a few deaths might have been "arranged.
Cone: In the Lincoln pieces with images and writings on sheets of metal, the text you chose, the photographs of Lincoln's clothes, the deathbed without Lincoln in it, muffle the violent subject matter. Your violence is muted. It is not as expressionistic and loud.
Noland: It does not threaten anyone. There is a method in my work which has taken a pathological trend. From the point at which I was making work out of objects I became interested in how, actually, under which circumstances people treat other people like objects. I became interested in psychopaths in particular, because they objectify people in order to manipulate them. By extension they represent the extreme embodiment of a culture's proclivities; so psychopathic behavior provides useful highlighted models to use in search of cultural norms. As does celebrity . . . I remember reading several interviews with Paul Newman where he talks about being treated like an object. Strangers want to walk up to him and prod him, vent feelings on him and knock on his surface to find out "who's home." When I think about celebrity that way I often think about Allan McCollum's surrogates, particularly the black and white plaster pictures.
Cone: How do you tie together psychopathic behavior with the way you work?
Noland: The way I put my work together is a type of inventiveness that is almost the kind of hostile throwaway you encounter often in horror films. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, those people who do meatpacking in some backwater ingrown town, they murder, slaughter and butcher people the way they would animals. They take the body of a person and whack him onto a meat hook on the wall, and somebody else they fold into a square and smash him into a freezer. It's an extreme case of treating people like objects, and it has this throwaway inventiveness.
Cone: Like a gag?
Noland: An adolescent walks down the street with a couple of friends eating an ice cream cone and suddenly smashes it into the coin return slot of a pay phone. It's a nihilistic, negative, gratuitous thing, not functional. It does not facilitate anything, yet it's a pleasure to make the thing function in this other way. I like using objects in the original sense, letting objects be what they are.
Cone: But you are attracted to objects which have a lot of cultural meaning packed in them?
Noland: Yes, but I also like anonymous kinds of things. To treat objects like objects is to do something to them — which is not to say necessarily to transform them — which implies a kind of ascendancy or positive motion forward. This would be a modern movement. What I'm describing is not postmodern either, though. That implies a kind of faith in various styles.
Cone: Still, even anonymous kinds of things are made of certain materials with definite associations. Like the metal of your walkers connotes coldness, even coldbloodedness, when it its thought about in the context of violence that your work deals with.
Noland: About the metal: the use of it is sometimes hierarchical — to use chrome one place and galvanized aluminum in another is to describe relative relationships to it. The coolness might infer dissociation, but the mirror effect in some places is to draw you back in after the dissociation.
Cone: So in effect you do not agree with Alain Robbe-Grillet, saying "Now the world is neither meaningful nor absurd, it just is," nor with Baudrillard's apocalyptic nihilism. You'd rather say the world is full of signs whose meanings are transient, changing and relative?
Noland: The co-option of Baudrillard into art lingo seems so lame. If you have to ask, "emptied of meaning" for whom? What happened to the notion of relativity? This refracted concept of a society was what Emile Durkheim first traced as a model and which Weber later disputed and redirected by addressing relativity: Even if there is one set of goals within a society deemed desirable to obtain — there is certain to be differentiated access to it for different groups within that society; and where one group may be positively directed with institutionally and constitutionally easy access to those goals, another group may have to try to attain those goals through other channels, in ways which are actually "against the law." To dream up a society in which all things have been emptied of meaning is to aver in the end that there exist no class distinctions in that class — an irresponsible representation.
.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
2 years ago I wandered into the Steven Parrino retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo without having any idea who he was. The retrospective, along with its partener exhibition, Bastard Creature, which featured other favourites including Banks Violette, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Robert Smithson and Frank Stella, where perphaps two of the best exhibitions that I have ever seen, and have stayed with me ever since. I have been revisiting his writting and work a lot this summer.
this is a pdf of a catalog that accompanied the exhibition in print form.
CHECK IT OUT HERE.
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this is a pdf of a catalog that accompanied the exhibition in print form.
CHECK IT OUT HERE.
.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
SOCEITY OF CONTROL
I am really not at all sure who runs this site, as it seems to have some connection to a few different artists, however, there are some great texts about the comodification of subversive acts on here.
Don't enjoy 'em!
SOCIETY OF CONTROL
.
Don't enjoy 'em!
SOCIETY OF CONTROL
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Monday, July 27, 2009
Christopher Wool in converstation with Albert Oehlen.
whole text here
WOOL: Was it you or Kippenberger who said, “When you run out of ideas, you make a diptych”?
OEHLEN: Well, it’s a saying. If you run out of ideas, you make a triptych.
WOOL: Have you made any triptychs recently?
OEHLEN: No.
WOOL: ’Cause that’s a terrible idea.
OEHLEN: I’m not running out of ideas. [laughs]
WOOL: No, but we’re talking about bad painting. Would you dare to make a triptych? ’Cause that’s a seriously terrible thing.
OEHLEN: It is bad, yeah—it’s a challenge.
.
whole text here
WOOL: Was it you or Kippenberger who said, “When you run out of ideas, you make a diptych”?
OEHLEN: Well, it’s a saying. If you run out of ideas, you make a triptych.
WOOL: Have you made any triptychs recently?
OEHLEN: No.
WOOL: ’Cause that’s a terrible idea.
OEHLEN: I’m not running out of ideas. [laughs]
WOOL: No, but we’re talking about bad painting. Would you dare to make a triptych? ’Cause that’s a seriously terrible thing.
OEHLEN: It is bad, yeah—it’s a challenge.
.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Ann Goldstein
More compelling, because more perverse, is the idea of tackling the problem with what appears to be the least suitable vehicle available, painting. It is perfect camouflage, and it must be remembered that Picasso considered cubism and camouflage to be one and the same, a device of misrepresentation, a deconstrucrive tool designed to undermine the certainty of appearances. The appropriation of painting as a subversive method allows one to place critical aesthetic activity at the center of the marketplace, where it can cause the most trouble.
.
More compelling, because more perverse, is the idea of tackling the problem with what appears to be the least suitable vehicle available, painting. It is perfect camouflage, and it must be remembered that Picasso considered cubism and camouflage to be one and the same, a device of misrepresentation, a deconstrucrive tool designed to undermine the certainty of appearances. The appropriation of painting as a subversive method allows one to place critical aesthetic activity at the center of the marketplace, where it can cause the most trouble.
.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
CHAOS: THE BROADSHEETS OF ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM
Hakim Bey
full text here
from the chapter entitled POETIC TERRORISM
(a big thanks to grim crockard to putting me onto this text)
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails.
PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.
An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.
Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.
.
Hakim Bey
full text here
from the chapter entitled POETIC TERRORISM
(a big thanks to grim crockard to putting me onto this text)
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails.
PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.
An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.
Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.
.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Art-as-Art
Ad Reinhardt
The one evolution of art forms unfolds in one straight logical line of negative actions and reactions, in one predestined, eternally recurrent stylistic cycle, in the same all-over pattern, in all times and places, taking different times in different places, always beginning with an "early" archaic schematization, achieving a climax with a "classic" formulation, and decaying with the "late" endless variety of illusionisms and expressionisms. When late stages wash away all lines of demarcation, framework, and fabric, with "anything can be art", "anybody can be an artist", "that's life", "why fight it", "anything goes", and "it makes no difference whether art is abstract or representational", the artists' world is a mannerist and primitivist art trade and suicide-vaudeville, venal, genial, contemptible, trifling.
.
The End of Painting
Douglas Crimp
The symptoms were everywhere: in the work of painters themselves, all of whom seemed to be reiterating Ad Reinhardt's claim that he was "just making the last paintings anyone could make" or allowing their paintings to be contaminated with such alien elements as photographic images; in minimal sculpture, which provided a definite rupture with painting's unavoidable ties to a centuries-old idealism; in all other mediums to which artists turned, as one after another, they abandoned painting. The dimension that had always resisted even painting's most dazzling feats of illusionism - time - now became the dimension in which artists staged their activities as they embraced film, video, and performance. And, after waiting out the entire era of modernism, photography reappeared, finally to claim its inheritance.
Ad Reinhardt
The one evolution of art forms unfolds in one straight logical line of negative actions and reactions, in one predestined, eternally recurrent stylistic cycle, in the same all-over pattern, in all times and places, taking different times in different places, always beginning with an "early" archaic schematization, achieving a climax with a "classic" formulation, and decaying with the "late" endless variety of illusionisms and expressionisms. When late stages wash away all lines of demarcation, framework, and fabric, with "anything can be art", "anybody can be an artist", "that's life", "why fight it", "anything goes", and "it makes no difference whether art is abstract or representational", the artists' world is a mannerist and primitivist art trade and suicide-vaudeville, venal, genial, contemptible, trifling.
.
The End of Painting
Douglas Crimp
The symptoms were everywhere: in the work of painters themselves, all of whom seemed to be reiterating Ad Reinhardt's claim that he was "just making the last paintings anyone could make" or allowing their paintings to be contaminated with such alien elements as photographic images; in minimal sculpture, which provided a definite rupture with painting's unavoidable ties to a centuries-old idealism; in all other mediums to which artists turned, as one after another, they abandoned painting. The dimension that had always resisted even painting's most dazzling feats of illusionism - time - now became the dimension in which artists staged their activities as they embraced film, video, and performance. And, after waiting out the entire era of modernism, photography reappeared, finally to claim its inheritance.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Excerpted from an article by Dropper Ishmael in Inner Space, No. 4
Drop City, Colorado: In Drop City we have attempted to create a total living environment outside the structure of society, where the artist can remain in touch with himself, the universe and other creative human beings.
Each Dropper is free. Does what he wants, when he wants and how he wants. No rules, no duties, no obligations.
Anarchy. But as anarchistic as the growth of an organism. Has its own internal needs and desires; fulfills them in a natural simple way, without compulsion.
The need to work: out of guilt, emptiness.
Need abandoned: desire (hopefully) arises. No longer work, but pleasure. As gratifying as eating or loving. Work — play.
Doing nothing is work.
We are based on the pleasure principle. Our main concern is being alive.
None of us is employed or has a steady income. How do we make it? Food? Materials?
At mercy of the gods.
But most of the time we don't worry about it. Drop City was begun without money, built on practically nothing.
Things have come to us.
Somehow we haven't gone hungry. Or done without materials. Yet.
America, affluent waste society. Enough waste to feed and house ten thousand artists, enough junk to turn into a thousand thousand works of art. To the townspeople (Trinidad, Colorado, 5 miles away) we are scrounges, bums, garbage pickers. They are right. Perhaps the most beautiful creation in all of Drop City is our junk pile, the garbage of the garbage pickers.
We are sensualists.
There are thousands of undiscovered, unnamed senses. We attempt to nurture every one.
Drop City is six acres of abandoned goat pasture.
Population fourteen.
We live in geodesic domes, structures built along molecular principles, basic energetic building blocks of the universe, the strongest, most efficient use of enclosed space. Following certain dynamic structural laws, the dome helps provide its own heat in winter, its own air conditioning in summer. Psychologically it creates an atmosphere of inner harmony and freedom. An expansive structure: no corners to hide in, no vertical-horizontal rigidities. Simplest to build. Cheapest. A 25-foot diameter dome costs less than $200, sometimes much less.
Drop City is the first attempt to use domes for housing a community.
Five geodesic domes have been built, mostly from "waste materials." The largest, still under construction, has a 40-foot diameter. When completed it will serve as studio space and as a total involvement light music sound environment. The interior —over 2,000 square feet — will be a painting.
Droppers come in all sizes, shapes and colors: painters, writers, architects, panhandlers, filmmakers, magicians, gluttons, musicians, wizards, unclassifiables.
But we all have this in common — whatever art we each produce is not separated from our lives. Each of us is the pigment in his own life-painting.
We are the recipients of R. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Award for 1966.
A psychedelic community? Chemically, no. We consider drugs unnecessary. But etymologically, perhaps.
We are one spark of a great chain reaction.
Drop City, Colorado: In Drop City we have attempted to create a total living environment outside the structure of society, where the artist can remain in touch with himself, the universe and other creative human beings.
Each Dropper is free. Does what he wants, when he wants and how he wants. No rules, no duties, no obligations.
Anarchy. But as anarchistic as the growth of an organism. Has its own internal needs and desires; fulfills them in a natural simple way, without compulsion.
The need to work: out of guilt, emptiness.
Need abandoned: desire (hopefully) arises. No longer work, but pleasure. As gratifying as eating or loving. Work — play.
Doing nothing is work.
We are based on the pleasure principle. Our main concern is being alive.
None of us is employed or has a steady income. How do we make it? Food? Materials?
At mercy of the gods.
But most of the time we don't worry about it. Drop City was begun without money, built on practically nothing.
Things have come to us.
Somehow we haven't gone hungry. Or done without materials. Yet.
America, affluent waste society. Enough waste to feed and house ten thousand artists, enough junk to turn into a thousand thousand works of art. To the townspeople (Trinidad, Colorado, 5 miles away) we are scrounges, bums, garbage pickers. They are right. Perhaps the most beautiful creation in all of Drop City is our junk pile, the garbage of the garbage pickers.
We are sensualists.
There are thousands of undiscovered, unnamed senses. We attempt to nurture every one.
Drop City is six acres of abandoned goat pasture.
Population fourteen.
We live in geodesic domes, structures built along molecular principles, basic energetic building blocks of the universe, the strongest, most efficient use of enclosed space. Following certain dynamic structural laws, the dome helps provide its own heat in winter, its own air conditioning in summer. Psychologically it creates an atmosphere of inner harmony and freedom. An expansive structure: no corners to hide in, no vertical-horizontal rigidities. Simplest to build. Cheapest. A 25-foot diameter dome costs less than $200, sometimes much less.
Drop City is the first attempt to use domes for housing a community.
Five geodesic domes have been built, mostly from "waste materials." The largest, still under construction, has a 40-foot diameter. When completed it will serve as studio space and as a total involvement light music sound environment. The interior —over 2,000 square feet — will be a painting.
Droppers come in all sizes, shapes and colors: painters, writers, architects, panhandlers, filmmakers, magicians, gluttons, musicians, wizards, unclassifiables.
But we all have this in common — whatever art we each produce is not separated from our lives. Each of us is the pigment in his own life-painting.
We are the recipients of R. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Award for 1966.
A psychedelic community? Chemically, no. We consider drugs unnecessary. But etymologically, perhaps.
We are one spark of a great chain reaction.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Susan Sontag on Walter Benjiman
Susan Sontag once remarked that, in Benjamin's texts, sentences do not seem to generate in the ordinary way; they do not lead gently into one another, and do not create an obvious line of reasoning. Instead, it is as if each sentence "had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes", a style of writing and thinking Sontag calls "freeze-frame baroque." Sontag writes that "his major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct."
Quotes from Under the Sign Of Saturn by Susan Sontag
Quotes from Under the Sign Of Saturn by Susan Sontag
LIVING IN A VACUUM/NEW SLANG
The Language of Those in the Know
Alice Becker-Ho
ONLY WITH THE CREATION of a new language did the criminals of the fifteenth century effectively organize an independent and unified practice. The term argot (brotherhood of rogues1), the name they gave to themselves, became fused later on with their language.
This language is not simply discreet and defensive. It theorizes what is about to be done: it already is a project. It never talks for the sake of talking. For those who can understand this language, every aspect of it carries the permanent confirmation of their vision of the world. Slang is not a mere specialized jargon, nor is it a language grafted on to conventional speech. It is precisely the manifestation, as I have shown in L’Essence du Jargon2, of an outlook exclusive to the so-called dangerous classes. If indeed “We speak as we judge, and we judge as we feel” (Alfredo Niceforo, Le Génie de l’argot, 1912), then the dangerous classes enjoy the superiority over ordinary people of having created out of nothing a speech which is artificial in form, but not arbitrary, and in which the meaning of words is divorced from the sound and image commonly attached to meaning by those languages in current use. In this way the so-called dangerous classes put both themselves and their language firmly “in the picture” [affranchi3 in French]. The language of slang is essentially the enemy’s vernacular turned upside down, then disguised. When speech ceases to be the individual exercise of resolve and intelligence, it becomes the mere instrument of a higher power. Speech represents this power and is represented by it. Anyone then speaking this language comes to identify with it; they will talk the way it does. Thus it was only when they came into contact with those dangerous classes making their way out of the European old world that most American blacks stopped speaking the enemy’s language that, along with slavery itself, they had been learning. Slang is the complete opposite of a language spoken by slaves: it is therefore alien to all forms of ideology. Authorities everywhere know this only too well, and dread the thought of it.
Being the true speech of those in the know because they “have caught on”, slang is also the only language that names and defines itself: it goes just as well by the names of jobelin, argot, bigorne, cant, Jenish, javanais, pidgin, sabir [ex Spanish saber (to know)], or lingua franca, ladino, langue verte, etc.4 It is in short the sum total of every criminal argot5 whose terms, linked to the “special” skills of each “corporation”, came to enrich accordingly the body of slang in general use, by proceeding in the same frame of mind. "One slang is like another, for in slang there is a unity of thought. It merely translates the same words."6 To talk slang is above all to be recognized by one’s own kind: in Spain the term Germanía (Spanish thieves’ cant) conveys this fraternity very precisely; moreover the Latin for brother germanus gives us the Spanish hermano.
The dangerous classes and the representation of the executioner
In the period which first saw the emergence of the dangerous classes and their language, the executioner did not speak, he merely got on with his work. In accordance with the nature of the crime, he was the individual who variously branded, lashed, cut off the hand [poe, in medieval French], or the ear [ance], but more often than not the one who carried out the hanging [romp le suc]. In marked contrast to what subsequently obtained down through the ages, there was at first no one single executioner. Instead there were as many as were required in order to deal with the whole array of jurisdictions7 and the numbers of people sentenced. From the very beginning the figure of the executioner was well understood as a mere executor [exécuteur des Hautes Œuvres]; this is why both the vocabulary and the spirit characteristic of slang tend to dismiss the executioner as a mere underling. He appears as the matchmaker [marieux] who organizes the marriage ceremony - the hanging - between the person condemned and the death [la camarde8] they are to meet with, after which the gallows, and later on the guillotine, is left a widow [Veuve]. This conventional image of death draws its inspiration from the medieval “Danse macabre”. “Être de noce” [lit. to be invited to a wedding], thereafter “baiser la Veuve” [lit. to kiss the widow] both mean to be hanged. The other theme relating to death can clearly be found in the rotwelsch (German thieves’ cant) terms bebaisse gehen or baiern meaning to die or to be under sentence of death, which carry the literal meaning of “to go back home”, and are based on the Hebrew words ba’yis/ba’yit [house, home]. Out of these elements French argot would then go on to create basir [to kill], bazisseur [killer], and sbire [henchman], in addition to butte [killing] and the verb butter [to kill], the former to be found in the expressions gerbé à la butte [sentenced to death], and monter à la butte [to be guillotined].
One could compare this almost cheerful, verging on the relaxed, conception of death to an end game where on the whole the losers graciously accept defeat; thereby marking the brutal end of a life of adventure. Only with the coming of the French Revolution and the unfolding of its aftermath did loss of freedom become a punishment whose length “had to be commensurate with the gravity of the crime or offence. Dating also from this period we come across the first reformatories intended for children under the age of sixteen and for those juveniles arrested and detained at their parents’ request.” (Abbé Moreau, “Souvenirs de la Petite et de la Grande Roquette”). From that time on, the “Penitentiary” would nearly always take the place of the executioner. What the crook gained in longevity however, he lost many times over in happiness, with the “Maximum Security Wing” seeing to all that! Escape from the slammer and the “break-out” are thus abiding dreams. “At that time argot held sway over the steep little streets of Montmartre. You picked it up quickly from the rough bits of songs that managed to lend a certain mystique to military prisons and which conferred on that sombre piece of slaughterhouse equipment known as the guillotine a kind of social poetry that was very nurture to some youths … It was for having lived in just such an unreal and sensual world however that the poet François Villon nearly consigned his worthless body to the gibbet.” (Pierre Mac Orlan, “Villes”, 1927)
Totally cleaned out: the lot of the modern mug
Those who, having demonstrated all-round zero understanding, doubtless remain oblivious to the fact that they have lost everything, are merely the latest historical incarnation of the sucker or mug [le cave, in French]. To outlaws’ way of thinking these same mugs had always been hopeless dupes. But in times gone by the world they inhabited was a more unified and more coherent place that afforded them protection from what they feared the most: those social classes dubbed dangerous. The figure of the executioner had been conjured up for their benefit and served to reassure them. Nowadays modern governments are hoping to reassure them with nothing more than the magic of words. The mere mention of democracy begets the “rule of law”. Through the agency of slang, communication took place all along at the expense of the gull and his armed representatives. By re-using slang’s methods to fit its own agenda, government plays those who still had faith in it for fools. One category amongst the dangerous classes, one moreover that in former times supplied the authorities with their executioners, has thus changed sides. Victimized anew and as submissive as ever, there is at present nobody left for mugs to turn to for protection. Those who in the past had clung so tenaciously to masters, to gallows, to high walls, to religious, academic, or scientific guarantees, in a word to solid bearings, have ended up in a shambles that has to be seen to be believed. At every turn they come up against the ever more complex machines that have replaced the guillotines [“les bois de justice”] of yore. They are baffled: such is their longing to believe in progress. For the moment however, it is these machines that conduct the business of passing judgment, chopping off, and executing. Their mission hardly stops there though: machines establish, or for that matter just as quickly modify, any amount of criteria in line with the economic and political opportunities of the moment. They get to raise or lower the thresholds of tolerance to poisons, whether in the form of alcohol or drugs, food additives, toxic gases, or other industrial flotsam. They get to count up too the number of "dead souls" in order to trumpet increases in “life expectancy”; they programme one demolition to carry out a rebuilding somewhere else, only to end up tearing it down again. We are talking about machines here that call their own blunders "natural catastrophes” and their all too modern genocides “ethnic strife”. They provide the punter with a grounding in how to speak in “politically correct” wise, how to be a “computer-assisted “ reader, or how to fuck “rubbered-up”. Questions asked by machines are met with answers they themselves have devised. “By sowing doubts and then pruning them back they make the world produce abundant crops of uncertainties and quarrels … All I can say is that you can feel from experience that so many interpretations dissipate the truth and break it up.” (Montaigne, “Essays”, Book III, chapter 13)
Forever “let down”, the mug had all the same dreamt of better days, if not heaven. He opined that fairer consideration was his due and that rewards would ever and always be showered upon him in return for no end of submission and ingenuousness. Poor sucker [daim9].
For their part, having had “the devil and long habit as their teachers”10, few have had to grasp quicker than outlaws the danger of a language wielded by a government and backed up by its slaves. For my own part, argot is the only thing that has enabled me with any assurance to hit upon not only the etymologies but also the exact meaning of certain words derived from argot which have passed into ordinary language in such numbers. To achieve this, all I had to do was proceed and think like the dangerous classes: with distrust and lucidity. If, as seems to be the case, a wholesale reform of slang is currently underway, it will re-emerge naturally from the process as the language of those in the know. Take it that the latter will move to denounce the sham and confusion that come with machine language, not swallow them. Given that these machines have zero knowledge of reality and regularly blow the fuses in circuits overloaded with contradictory bits of information, it will scarcely be a difficult task. As for the specialists who handle them, they will finish up the “machine’s cuckolds”, just as the executioner was at one time called the “Widow’s cuckold”.
Alice Becker-Ho
ONLY WITH THE CREATION of a new language did the criminals of the fifteenth century effectively organize an independent and unified practice. The term argot (brotherhood of rogues1), the name they gave to themselves, became fused later on with their language.
This language is not simply discreet and defensive. It theorizes what is about to be done: it already is a project. It never talks for the sake of talking. For those who can understand this language, every aspect of it carries the permanent confirmation of their vision of the world. Slang is not a mere specialized jargon, nor is it a language grafted on to conventional speech. It is precisely the manifestation, as I have shown in L’Essence du Jargon2, of an outlook exclusive to the so-called dangerous classes. If indeed “We speak as we judge, and we judge as we feel” (Alfredo Niceforo, Le Génie de l’argot, 1912), then the dangerous classes enjoy the superiority over ordinary people of having created out of nothing a speech which is artificial in form, but not arbitrary, and in which the meaning of words is divorced from the sound and image commonly attached to meaning by those languages in current use. In this way the so-called dangerous classes put both themselves and their language firmly “in the picture” [affranchi3 in French]. The language of slang is essentially the enemy’s vernacular turned upside down, then disguised. When speech ceases to be the individual exercise of resolve and intelligence, it becomes the mere instrument of a higher power. Speech represents this power and is represented by it. Anyone then speaking this language comes to identify with it; they will talk the way it does. Thus it was only when they came into contact with those dangerous classes making their way out of the European old world that most American blacks stopped speaking the enemy’s language that, along with slavery itself, they had been learning. Slang is the complete opposite of a language spoken by slaves: it is therefore alien to all forms of ideology. Authorities everywhere know this only too well, and dread the thought of it.
Being the true speech of those in the know because they “have caught on”, slang is also the only language that names and defines itself: it goes just as well by the names of jobelin, argot, bigorne, cant, Jenish, javanais, pidgin, sabir [ex Spanish saber (to know)], or lingua franca, ladino, langue verte, etc.4 It is in short the sum total of every criminal argot5 whose terms, linked to the “special” skills of each “corporation”, came to enrich accordingly the body of slang in general use, by proceeding in the same frame of mind. "One slang is like another, for in slang there is a unity of thought. It merely translates the same words."6 To talk slang is above all to be recognized by one’s own kind: in Spain the term Germanía (Spanish thieves’ cant) conveys this fraternity very precisely; moreover the Latin for brother germanus gives us the Spanish hermano.
The dangerous classes and the representation of the executioner
In the period which first saw the emergence of the dangerous classes and their language, the executioner did not speak, he merely got on with his work. In accordance with the nature of the crime, he was the individual who variously branded, lashed, cut off the hand [poe, in medieval French], or the ear [ance], but more often than not the one who carried out the hanging [romp le suc]. In marked contrast to what subsequently obtained down through the ages, there was at first no one single executioner. Instead there were as many as were required in order to deal with the whole array of jurisdictions7 and the numbers of people sentenced. From the very beginning the figure of the executioner was well understood as a mere executor [exécuteur des Hautes Œuvres]; this is why both the vocabulary and the spirit characteristic of slang tend to dismiss the executioner as a mere underling. He appears as the matchmaker [marieux] who organizes the marriage ceremony - the hanging - between the person condemned and the death [la camarde8] they are to meet with, after which the gallows, and later on the guillotine, is left a widow [Veuve]. This conventional image of death draws its inspiration from the medieval “Danse macabre”. “Être de noce” [lit. to be invited to a wedding], thereafter “baiser la Veuve” [lit. to kiss the widow] both mean to be hanged. The other theme relating to death can clearly be found in the rotwelsch (German thieves’ cant) terms bebaisse gehen or baiern meaning to die or to be under sentence of death, which carry the literal meaning of “to go back home”, and are based on the Hebrew words ba’yis/ba’yit [house, home]. Out of these elements French argot would then go on to create basir [to kill], bazisseur [killer], and sbire [henchman], in addition to butte [killing] and the verb butter [to kill], the former to be found in the expressions gerbé à la butte [sentenced to death], and monter à la butte [to be guillotined].
One could compare this almost cheerful, verging on the relaxed, conception of death to an end game where on the whole the losers graciously accept defeat; thereby marking the brutal end of a life of adventure. Only with the coming of the French Revolution and the unfolding of its aftermath did loss of freedom become a punishment whose length “had to be commensurate with the gravity of the crime or offence. Dating also from this period we come across the first reformatories intended for children under the age of sixteen and for those juveniles arrested and detained at their parents’ request.” (Abbé Moreau, “Souvenirs de la Petite et de la Grande Roquette”). From that time on, the “Penitentiary” would nearly always take the place of the executioner. What the crook gained in longevity however, he lost many times over in happiness, with the “Maximum Security Wing” seeing to all that! Escape from the slammer and the “break-out” are thus abiding dreams. “At that time argot held sway over the steep little streets of Montmartre. You picked it up quickly from the rough bits of songs that managed to lend a certain mystique to military prisons and which conferred on that sombre piece of slaughterhouse equipment known as the guillotine a kind of social poetry that was very nurture to some youths … It was for having lived in just such an unreal and sensual world however that the poet François Villon nearly consigned his worthless body to the gibbet.” (Pierre Mac Orlan, “Villes”, 1927)
Totally cleaned out: the lot of the modern mug
Those who, having demonstrated all-round zero understanding, doubtless remain oblivious to the fact that they have lost everything, are merely the latest historical incarnation of the sucker or mug [le cave, in French]. To outlaws’ way of thinking these same mugs had always been hopeless dupes. But in times gone by the world they inhabited was a more unified and more coherent place that afforded them protection from what they feared the most: those social classes dubbed dangerous. The figure of the executioner had been conjured up for their benefit and served to reassure them. Nowadays modern governments are hoping to reassure them with nothing more than the magic of words. The mere mention of democracy begets the “rule of law”. Through the agency of slang, communication took place all along at the expense of the gull and his armed representatives. By re-using slang’s methods to fit its own agenda, government plays those who still had faith in it for fools. One category amongst the dangerous classes, one moreover that in former times supplied the authorities with their executioners, has thus changed sides. Victimized anew and as submissive as ever, there is at present nobody left for mugs to turn to for protection. Those who in the past had clung so tenaciously to masters, to gallows, to high walls, to religious, academic, or scientific guarantees, in a word to solid bearings, have ended up in a shambles that has to be seen to be believed. At every turn they come up against the ever more complex machines that have replaced the guillotines [“les bois de justice”] of yore. They are baffled: such is their longing to believe in progress. For the moment however, it is these machines that conduct the business of passing judgment, chopping off, and executing. Their mission hardly stops there though: machines establish, or for that matter just as quickly modify, any amount of criteria in line with the economic and political opportunities of the moment. They get to raise or lower the thresholds of tolerance to poisons, whether in the form of alcohol or drugs, food additives, toxic gases, or other industrial flotsam. They get to count up too the number of "dead souls" in order to trumpet increases in “life expectancy”; they programme one demolition to carry out a rebuilding somewhere else, only to end up tearing it down again. We are talking about machines here that call their own blunders "natural catastrophes” and their all too modern genocides “ethnic strife”. They provide the punter with a grounding in how to speak in “politically correct” wise, how to be a “computer-assisted “ reader, or how to fuck “rubbered-up”. Questions asked by machines are met with answers they themselves have devised. “By sowing doubts and then pruning them back they make the world produce abundant crops of uncertainties and quarrels … All I can say is that you can feel from experience that so many interpretations dissipate the truth and break it up.” (Montaigne, “Essays”, Book III, chapter 13)
Forever “let down”, the mug had all the same dreamt of better days, if not heaven. He opined that fairer consideration was his due and that rewards would ever and always be showered upon him in return for no end of submission and ingenuousness. Poor sucker [daim9].
For their part, having had “the devil and long habit as their teachers”10, few have had to grasp quicker than outlaws the danger of a language wielded by a government and backed up by its slaves. For my own part, argot is the only thing that has enabled me with any assurance to hit upon not only the etymologies but also the exact meaning of certain words derived from argot which have passed into ordinary language in such numbers. To achieve this, all I had to do was proceed and think like the dangerous classes: with distrust and lucidity. If, as seems to be the case, a wholesale reform of slang is currently underway, it will re-emerge naturally from the process as the language of those in the know. Take it that the latter will move to denounce the sham and confusion that come with machine language, not swallow them. Given that these machines have zero knowledge of reality and regularly blow the fuses in circuits overloaded with contradictory bits of information, it will scarcely be a difficult task. As for the specialists who handle them, they will finish up the “machine’s cuckolds”, just as the executioner was at one time called the “Widow’s cuckold”.
Select Passages from:
DESTRUCTION, NEGATION, SUBTRACTION - on Pier Paolo Pasolini •
Alain Badiou
THE FULL TEXT CAN BE READ HERE
The abstract contents of my lecture is a very simple one. I can summarize it in five points:
1. All creations, all novelties, are in some sense the affirmative part of a negation. "Negation", because if something happens as new, it cannot be reduced to the objectivity of the situation where it happens. So, it is certainly like a negative exception to the regular laws of this objectivity. But "affirmation", affirmative part of the negation, because if a creation is reducible to a negation of the common laws of objectivity, it completely depends on them concerning its identity. So the very essence of a novelty implies negation, but must affirm its identity apart of the negativity of negation. That is why I say that a creation or a novelty must be defined paradoxically as an affirmative part of negation.
2. I name "destruction" the negative part of negation. For example, if we consider the creation by SchÏnberg, at the beginning of the last century, of the dodecaphonic musical system, we can say that this creation achieves the destruction of the tonal system, which, in the western world has dominated the musical creation during three centuries. In the same direction, the Marxist idea of revolution is to achieve the process of immanent negation of capitalism by the complete destruction of the machinery of bourgeois State. In both cases, negation is the evental concentration of a process through which is achieved the complete disintegration of an old world. It is this evental concentration which realizes the negative power of negation, the negativity of negation. And I name it destruction.
3. I name subtraction the affirmative part of negation. For example, the new musical axioms which structure for SchÏnberg the admissible succession of notes in a musical work, outside the tonal system, are in no way deducible from the destruction of this system. They are the affirmative laws of a new framework for the musical activity. They show the possibility of a new coherence for musical discourse. The point that we must understand is that this new coherence is not new because it achieves the process of disintegration of the system. The new coherence is new to the extent that, in the framework that the SchÏnberg's axioms impose, the musical discourse avoids the laws of tonality, or, more precisely, becomes indifferent to these laws. That is why we can say that the musical discourse is subtracted from its tonal legislation. Clearly, this subtraction is in the horizon of negation ; but it exists apart from the purely negative part of negation. It exists apart from destruction.
It is the same thing for Marx in the political context. Marx insists on saying that the destruction of the bourgeois State is not in itself an achievement. The goal is communism, that is the end of the State as such, and the end of social classes, in favour of a purely egalitarian organization of the civil society. But to come to this, we must first substitute to the bourgeois State a new State, which is not the immediate result of the destruction of the first. In fact, it is a State as different of the bourgeois State as experimental music of today can be of an academic tonal piece of the 19th century, or a contemporary performance can be of an academic representation of Olympic Gods. For the new State - that Marx names "dictatorship of the proletariat" - is a State which organizes its own vanishing, a State which is in its very essence the process of the non-State. Perhaps as for Adorno the "informal music" is the process, in a work, of the disintegration of all forms. So we can say that in the original thought of Marx, "dictatorship of the proletariat" was a name for a State which is subtracted from all classical laws of a "normal" State. For a classical State is a form of power; but the State named "dictatorship of proletariat" is the power of un-power, the power of the disappearance of the question of power. In any case we name subtraction this part of negation which is oriented by the possibility of something which exists absolutely apart from what exists under the laws of what negation negates.
4. So negation is always, in its concrete action - political or artistic - suspended between destruction and subtraction. That the very essence of negation is destruction has been the fundamental idea of the last century. The fundamental idea of the beginning century must be that the very essence of negation is subtraction.
5. But subtraction is not the negation of destruction, no more than destruction has been the negation of subtraction, as we have seen with SchÏnberg or Marx. The most difficult question is precisely to maintain the complete concept of negation from the point of view of subtraction, as Lenin, Schoenberg, or Marcel Duchamp, or Cage, or Mao Zedong, or Jackson Pollock have maintained the complete concept of negation from the point of view of destruction.
We can now conclude: the political problems of the contemporary world cannot be solved, neither in the weak context of democratic opposition, which in fact abandons millions of people to a nihilistic destiny, nor in the mystical context of destructive negation, which is an other form of power, the power of death. Neither subtraction without destruction, nor destruction without subtraction. It is in fact the problem of violence today. Violence is not, as has been said during the last century the creative and revolutionary part of negation. The way of freedom is a subtractive one; But to protect the subtraction itself, to defend the new kingdom of emancipatory politics, we cannot radically exclude all forms of violence; The future is not on the side of the savage young men and women of popular suburbs, we cannot abandon them to themselves. But the future is not on the side of the democratic wisdom of mothers and fathers law. We have to learn something of nihilistic subjectivity.
The world is made not of law and order, but of law and desire. Let us learn from Pasolini not to be "absorbed in a mysterious debate with power", not to abandon millions of young men ands women neither "in the white mountains", nor "on the serene plains".
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DESTRUCTION, NEGATION, SUBTRACTION - on Pier Paolo Pasolini •
Alain Badiou
THE FULL TEXT CAN BE READ HERE
The abstract contents of my lecture is a very simple one. I can summarize it in five points:
1. All creations, all novelties, are in some sense the affirmative part of a negation. "Negation", because if something happens as new, it cannot be reduced to the objectivity of the situation where it happens. So, it is certainly like a negative exception to the regular laws of this objectivity. But "affirmation", affirmative part of the negation, because if a creation is reducible to a negation of the common laws of objectivity, it completely depends on them concerning its identity. So the very essence of a novelty implies negation, but must affirm its identity apart of the negativity of negation. That is why I say that a creation or a novelty must be defined paradoxically as an affirmative part of negation.
2. I name "destruction" the negative part of negation. For example, if we consider the creation by SchÏnberg, at the beginning of the last century, of the dodecaphonic musical system, we can say that this creation achieves the destruction of the tonal system, which, in the western world has dominated the musical creation during three centuries. In the same direction, the Marxist idea of revolution is to achieve the process of immanent negation of capitalism by the complete destruction of the machinery of bourgeois State. In both cases, negation is the evental concentration of a process through which is achieved the complete disintegration of an old world. It is this evental concentration which realizes the negative power of negation, the negativity of negation. And I name it destruction.
3. I name subtraction the affirmative part of negation. For example, the new musical axioms which structure for SchÏnberg the admissible succession of notes in a musical work, outside the tonal system, are in no way deducible from the destruction of this system. They are the affirmative laws of a new framework for the musical activity. They show the possibility of a new coherence for musical discourse. The point that we must understand is that this new coherence is not new because it achieves the process of disintegration of the system. The new coherence is new to the extent that, in the framework that the SchÏnberg's axioms impose, the musical discourse avoids the laws of tonality, or, more precisely, becomes indifferent to these laws. That is why we can say that the musical discourse is subtracted from its tonal legislation. Clearly, this subtraction is in the horizon of negation ; but it exists apart from the purely negative part of negation. It exists apart from destruction.
It is the same thing for Marx in the political context. Marx insists on saying that the destruction of the bourgeois State is not in itself an achievement. The goal is communism, that is the end of the State as such, and the end of social classes, in favour of a purely egalitarian organization of the civil society. But to come to this, we must first substitute to the bourgeois State a new State, which is not the immediate result of the destruction of the first. In fact, it is a State as different of the bourgeois State as experimental music of today can be of an academic tonal piece of the 19th century, or a contemporary performance can be of an academic representation of Olympic Gods. For the new State - that Marx names "dictatorship of the proletariat" - is a State which organizes its own vanishing, a State which is in its very essence the process of the non-State. Perhaps as for Adorno the "informal music" is the process, in a work, of the disintegration of all forms. So we can say that in the original thought of Marx, "dictatorship of the proletariat" was a name for a State which is subtracted from all classical laws of a "normal" State. For a classical State is a form of power; but the State named "dictatorship of proletariat" is the power of un-power, the power of the disappearance of the question of power. In any case we name subtraction this part of negation which is oriented by the possibility of something which exists absolutely apart from what exists under the laws of what negation negates.
4. So negation is always, in its concrete action - political or artistic - suspended between destruction and subtraction. That the very essence of negation is destruction has been the fundamental idea of the last century. The fundamental idea of the beginning century must be that the very essence of negation is subtraction.
5. But subtraction is not the negation of destruction, no more than destruction has been the negation of subtraction, as we have seen with SchÏnberg or Marx. The most difficult question is precisely to maintain the complete concept of negation from the point of view of subtraction, as Lenin, Schoenberg, or Marcel Duchamp, or Cage, or Mao Zedong, or Jackson Pollock have maintained the complete concept of negation from the point of view of destruction.
We can now conclude: the political problems of the contemporary world cannot be solved, neither in the weak context of democratic opposition, which in fact abandons millions of people to a nihilistic destiny, nor in the mystical context of destructive negation, which is an other form of power, the power of death. Neither subtraction without destruction, nor destruction without subtraction. It is in fact the problem of violence today. Violence is not, as has been said during the last century the creative and revolutionary part of negation. The way of freedom is a subtractive one; But to protect the subtraction itself, to defend the new kingdom of emancipatory politics, we cannot radically exclude all forms of violence; The future is not on the side of the savage young men and women of popular suburbs, we cannot abandon them to themselves. But the future is not on the side of the democratic wisdom of mothers and fathers law. We have to learn something of nihilistic subjectivity.
The world is made not of law and order, but of law and desire. Let us learn from Pasolini not to be "absorbed in a mysterious debate with power", not to abandon millions of young men ands women neither "in the white mountains", nor "on the serene plains".
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Entropy for New Monuments
Robert Smithson
The impure-purist surface is very much in evidence in the new abstract art, but I think Stella was the first to employ it. The iridescent purple, green, and silver surfaces that followed Stella's all-black works, conveyed a rather lurid presence through their symmetries. An exacerbated, gorgeous color gives a chilling bite to the purist context. Immaculate beginnings are subsumed by glittering ends. Like Mallarme's "Herodiade," these surfaces disclose a "cold scintillation"; they seem to "love the horror of being virgin." These inaccessible surfaces deny any definite meaning in the most definite way. Here beauty is allied with the repulsive in accordance with highly rigid rules. One's sight is mentally abolished by Stella's hermetic kingdom of surfaces.
Robert Smithson
The impure-purist surface is very much in evidence in the new abstract art, but I think Stella was the first to employ it. The iridescent purple, green, and silver surfaces that followed Stella's all-black works, conveyed a rather lurid presence through their symmetries. An exacerbated, gorgeous color gives a chilling bite to the purist context. Immaculate beginnings are subsumed by glittering ends. Like Mallarme's "Herodiade," these surfaces disclose a "cold scintillation"; they seem to "love the horror of being virgin." These inaccessible surfaces deny any definite meaning in the most definite way. Here beauty is allied with the repulsive in accordance with highly rigid rules. One's sight is mentally abolished by Stella's hermetic kingdom of surfaces.
NEGATION X MASTERPIECE = THE NEW VANGAURD
Exceprts from:
The Anticoncept
Gil J Wolman
Preface
Let X be the original. All art poses the elementary equation: movement of X. Progenitor of the cinematograph: movement of photography.
An art evolves by multiplying its origin by elements that are specific to it.
AND A NEW ART BEGINS.
I love you I no longer love you he loves another woman.
Beneath the mask she must be pretty she must be ugly.
THEOREM.
There is no negation that does not affirm itself elsewhere.
Negation is the transitional term to a new period.
Negation of the intrinsic, immutable, a priori concept, projects this concept outside of matter, reveals it a posteriori to an extrinsic reaction, becomes mutable by as many reactions.
THE TIME OF POETS IS FINISHED.
TODAY I'M SLEEPING.
The Anticoncept
Gil J Wolman
Preface
Let X be the original. All art poses the elementary equation: movement of X. Progenitor of the cinematograph: movement of photography.
An art evolves by multiplying its origin by elements that are specific to it.
AND A NEW ART BEGINS.
I love you I no longer love you he loves another woman.
Beneath the mask she must be pretty she must be ugly.
THEOREM.
There is no negation that does not affirm itself elsewhere.
Negation is the transitional term to a new period.
Negation of the intrinsic, immutable, a priori concept, projects this concept outside of matter, reveals it a posteriori to an extrinsic reaction, becomes mutable by as many reactions.
THE TIME OF POETS IS FINISHED.
TODAY I'M SLEEPING.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Entropy for new monuments
Robert Smithson
The works of many of these artists celebrate what Flavin calls "inactive history" or what the physicist calls "entropy" or "energy-drain." They bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age, and would most likely confirm Vladimir Nabokov's observation that, "The future is but the obsolete in reverse."
Robert Smithson
The works of many of these artists celebrate what Flavin calls "inactive history" or what the physicist calls "entropy" or "energy-drain." They bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age, and would most likely confirm Vladimir Nabokov's observation that, "The future is but the obsolete in reverse."
The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution
Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray, Donald Nicholson-Smith & Charles Radcliffe
In the end, for all its fury (and Symbolists and Anarchists worked side-by-side in the 1890s) revolutionary art was caught in contradictions. It could not or would not break free of the forms of bourgeois culture as a whole. Its content and method could become transformations of the world but, while art remained imprisoned within the social spectacle, its transformations remained imaginary. Rather than enter into direct social conflict with the reality it criticized, it transferred the whole problem into an abstract and inoffensive sphere where it functioned objectively as a force consolidating all it wanted to destroy. Revolt against reality became the evasion of reality. Marx's original critique of the genesis of religious myth and ideology applies word-for-word to the rebellion of bourgeois art: it too "is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. It is the sigh of the oppresses creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people" [Marx, Contribution to the critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"].
Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray, Donald Nicholson-Smith & Charles Radcliffe
In the end, for all its fury (and Symbolists and Anarchists worked side-by-side in the 1890s) revolutionary art was caught in contradictions. It could not or would not break free of the forms of bourgeois culture as a whole. Its content and method could become transformations of the world but, while art remained imprisoned within the social spectacle, its transformations remained imaginary. Rather than enter into direct social conflict with the reality it criticized, it transferred the whole problem into an abstract and inoffensive sphere where it functioned objectively as a force consolidating all it wanted to destroy. Revolt against reality became the evasion of reality. Marx's original critique of the genesis of religious myth and ideology applies word-for-word to the rebellion of bourgeois art: it too "is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. It is the sigh of the oppresses creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people" [Marx, Contribution to the critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"].
The Avant-garde is Undesirable
Helmut Sturm, Heimrad Prem, Lothar Fischer, Dieter Kunzelmann, Hans-Peter Zimmer, Staffan Larsson, Asger Jorn, Jørgen Nash, Katja Lindell & Maurice Wyckaert
January 1961
1. The avant-garde of today that does not reiterate accepted mystifications is nevertheless socially repressed. The movement society desires is the one that it can buy up — it is the pseudo-avant-garde.
2. To those who create new values, the life of today appears to be an illusion, a fragment. If the avant-garde puts into question the meaning of life and wishes to put to practical use its conclusions, it finds itself cut-off from all possibilities and sealed-off from society.
3. The aesthetic debris of the avant-garde (pictures, film, poetry, etc.) have become both desirable and ineffectual. What is undesirable is the complete reorganization of the conditions of life such that the basis of society is altered.
4. Once the products of the avant-garde have been neutralized aesthetically and brought upon the market, its issues — directed as always at realization through all of life — must be split up, talked to death and side-tracked. We protest in the name of the avant-garde past and present, and in the names of all the isolated and dissatisfied artists, against this cultural necrophilia; we call on all creative powers to boycott such discussions.
5. Modern culture has no substance, possesses no strength capable of mounting a real resistance to the resolutions of the avant-garde.
6. We, the creators of new values, are no longer shouted down by the protectors of culture, but are assigned designations in specialised fields, and our demands are thus made to appear ridiculous.
7. In this society, artists are expected to take over the role of the Court Fools of the past, expected to take payment for providing society with the delusion that there is a special kind of cultural freedom.
8. Social snobbery would prescribe for the avant-garde a particular place, which it can't leave without giving up its respectability.
9. The very life of the artist is the leavening agent in the rising of a new society from our withering European culture. This is not a process that should be stopped; it should be sped up!
10. European culture is a sick, pregnant, old hag who is going to die. Should we try to save the mother or the child? Some would try to rescue the mother, even if it meant killing the child. The avant-garde has decided: the mother must die so that the child may live!
11. Yesterday's avant-garde is old hat. The problem with the artistic, political left today is one of truth: "A Truth only lives to be ten years old" (Ibsen).
12. Artists and intellectuals! Support the Situationist movement, for it chases after no Utopias. It is the only movement that will relieve the condition of contemporary culture.
13. The duty of the avant-garde consists solely and utterly in enforcing its recognition before its discipline and its program have become watered down — and this is precisely what the Situationist International intends to do.
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Helmut Sturm, Heimrad Prem, Lothar Fischer, Dieter Kunzelmann, Hans-Peter Zimmer, Staffan Larsson, Asger Jorn, Jørgen Nash, Katja Lindell & Maurice Wyckaert
January 1961
1. The avant-garde of today that does not reiterate accepted mystifications is nevertheless socially repressed. The movement society desires is the one that it can buy up — it is the pseudo-avant-garde.
2. To those who create new values, the life of today appears to be an illusion, a fragment. If the avant-garde puts into question the meaning of life and wishes to put to practical use its conclusions, it finds itself cut-off from all possibilities and sealed-off from society.
3. The aesthetic debris of the avant-garde (pictures, film, poetry, etc.) have become both desirable and ineffectual. What is undesirable is the complete reorganization of the conditions of life such that the basis of society is altered.
4. Once the products of the avant-garde have been neutralized aesthetically and brought upon the market, its issues — directed as always at realization through all of life — must be split up, talked to death and side-tracked. We protest in the name of the avant-garde past and present, and in the names of all the isolated and dissatisfied artists, against this cultural necrophilia; we call on all creative powers to boycott such discussions.
5. Modern culture has no substance, possesses no strength capable of mounting a real resistance to the resolutions of the avant-garde.
6. We, the creators of new values, are no longer shouted down by the protectors of culture, but are assigned designations in specialised fields, and our demands are thus made to appear ridiculous.
7. In this society, artists are expected to take over the role of the Court Fools of the past, expected to take payment for providing society with the delusion that there is a special kind of cultural freedom.
8. Social snobbery would prescribe for the avant-garde a particular place, which it can't leave without giving up its respectability.
9. The very life of the artist is the leavening agent in the rising of a new society from our withering European culture. This is not a process that should be stopped; it should be sped up!
10. European culture is a sick, pregnant, old hag who is going to die. Should we try to save the mother or the child? Some would try to rescue the mother, even if it meant killing the child. The avant-garde has decided: the mother must die so that the child may live!
11. Yesterday's avant-garde is old hat. The problem with the artistic, political left today is one of truth: "A Truth only lives to be ten years old" (Ibsen).
12. Artists and intellectuals! Support the Situationist movement, for it chases after no Utopias. It is the only movement that will relieve the condition of contemporary culture.
13. The duty of the avant-garde consists solely and utterly in enforcing its recognition before its discipline and its program have become watered down — and this is precisely what the Situationist International intends to do.
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The Destructive Character
Walter Benjamin (November 1931)
It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character.
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.
The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.
The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space – the place where thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it.
The destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy.
The destructive character is a signal. Just a trigonometric sign is exposed on all sides to the wind, so he is exposed to idle talk. To protect him from it is pointless.
The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. The most petty bourgeois of all phenomena, gossip, comes about only because people do not wish to be misunderstood. The destructive character tolerates misunderstanding; he does not promote gossip.
The destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.
The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Some people pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.
The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.
The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.
The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worthing living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
Walter Benjamin (November 1931)
It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character.
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.
The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.
The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space – the place where thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it.
The destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy.
The destructive character is a signal. Just a trigonometric sign is exposed on all sides to the wind, so he is exposed to idle talk. To protect him from it is pointless.
The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. The most petty bourgeois of all phenomena, gossip, comes about only because people do not wish to be misunderstood. The destructive character tolerates misunderstanding; he does not promote gossip.
The destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.
The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Some people pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.
The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.
The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.
The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worthing living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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