AD603 Critical Theory

I can’t take credit for this entry title, it was a band name that Colombian artist Esteban Garcia came up with.  I thought it was a good example of an artist responding actively to the reality of his time.

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According to Mosquera:

The Other needs to stop adapting their art to Western expectations, and embrace how colonialization has affected their culture.  They need to “respond actively to the reality of their time”.   The reliance/acceptance of  on traditional methods/expectations is a product of colonialism only perpetuates Eurocentralization.

Responding to Mosquera:

What was postmodernity thinking when it placed otherness in the foreground?!

We live in “a great time of hybrids”, as Mexican rock star Rockdrigo sang.

In general, outside of just otherness, I feel the solutions offered up with art are almost exclusively self-referential.  Contemporary art is less about the individual and more about its own place in the art world.  Its relationship to the art world takes first consideration.  Not to say that’s a bad thing.  Isn’t that what the MFA program emphasizes?  It seemed Mosquera was suggesting that artists representing the Other should purposely work as contemporary non-traditionalists.  If it is that deliberate, is it more or less authentic?

I enjoyed how he described the “contemporary artistic scene” as more Manhattan-centric than Eurocentric.  Isn’t that just what New York wants to hear?  It might be true on some level, but it really depends on the perspective of the artist - or art critic.  I think so much of contemporary art operates outside of galleries and museums now that the whole notion of “making it in New York” is irrelevant.

Mosquera is an Adjunct Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

Frederic Jameson writes (pg 132, The Anti-Aesthetic):

“if the experience and ideology of the unique self, an experience and ideology which informed the stylistic practices of classical modernism, is over and done with, then it is no longer clear what the artists and writers of the present period are supposed to be doing.”

Without delving too deeply into extended discussion, that statement sums up art of the postmodern era.  That lack of clarity is the essence behind the vague postmodern definition of art.  As artists, we really couldn’t ask for anything more.  Can you imagine any other career that would allow for such openness?  No, you cannot.

The artist in the modern era was sensationalized.  Modernism broke down the confining definition of “high art” and as Jameson writes “did not go well…with the conventions of polite society”.  That sensation turned them into celebrity art geniuses.  The value of the “unique personality” was inflated.  It seems every artist did something different, so now there are no unique new styles to invent.  If individualism is dead, where does art go?  Well, empowered like the toughest kid in school, wherever it wants to go.

Goodbye Jackson Pollock. Hello Paper Rad.

Jameson explains postmodernity is defined by the pastiche, an indirect reference to the past, … something modernity sought to avoid.  It is also defined by what Jameson calls schizophrenia, in that there is a language disorder (communication breakdown) and lack of personal identity of the artist.

Foucault seems to be a hesitant proponent for post-modernism.  While reading his conversation with Rabinow I came to the conclusion that Foucault was saying that critical thought should not exist without reference to history,  something that Modernity seeks to suppress while embracing rational thought.

He does acknowledge that there is a tendency for people to negatively compare the present to the past, usually resulting in a false sentiment that doesn’t fairly compare the two.  Like how a person might be appalled by contemporary sexuality,  without taking into consideration the progress sexuality has made (private bedrooms).   This thought process builds a mythical past, and really is just an explanation for people not being able to come to terms with their own age and the passing of Father Time.  Of course, old people tend to talk about how rough they had it too: “I had to walk five miles to school, in the snow, uphill both ways”.

GRAMPA SIMPSON

Foucault proceeds to discuss the reason and rationality we use and how it is used as the center of critical thought (oh no!).  This requires taking notice of history.  Modernism seeks to use ONLY rationalism and suppress history which, according to Foucault, can lead to an irrational form of rationalism.  Critical thought must embrace this “revolving door of rationality” and acknowledging history is part of that.  Post-modernity allows for this flexibility of rational thought that refers to history.  Seems Foucault was slightly conflicted with his ideas, and his theories seemed to embrace that conflict.

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I struggled with grasping the idea of heterotopia.  To me it seems that some form of it is included within every aspect of living in some way.   Is this Foucault’s method of categorizing the separate spaces that are compiled into a person’s life and living reality?  And he is actually talking about real external space, right?  The environments we exist in?  One detailed example he touched on very briefly is the railroad system.

“a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by”

While reading that segment I was imagining the space that is defined by the New York subway system.  It is a constantly moving space that hundreds of millions of people from all over the world have encountered.  In relation to what Foucault names the second principle of his heterotopias description, this one defined space of the NY subway serves as a particular function for each time it is used by each person.  It also therefore has completely different meanings to each person at each instance.  In relation to the third principle, it makes differing real place compatible with each other, opposing neighborhoods on opposite ends of town.  In relation to the fourth principle, the subway system links transitory slices of time from individuals’ lives.  Each ride is like a festival in itself!  And like Foucault’s fifth principle, the use of the system is relegated to purchasers of passes and tickets.  It is an isolated yet penetrable environment that can be entered through a particular ritual.

1972 NY CITY SUBWAY MAP

The It-Self is dispersed systematically by individual structure, beginning at birth through mid-life.  It is this instance point that the It-Self filters out of the NON-EGO.  The unknown quantity is portioned by the Ur, the re-repressed memory.  Before the It-Self is realized (in the Lacanian mirror) it floats freely in the conscious of a child less than 4 months old, no more.  Objects of reality (again, this is pre-mirror) such as a doorknob, will not solidify as “thought” until the It-Self disperses via the Ur.  “I know that is a doorknob, but I do not know”.  It is not until the child reads “doorknob”, text as visual and phonetic symbol, that the definition and notion of a “doorknob” enters the Post Conscious (see Fig. 1-1).  The unconscious It-Self.

Fig. 1-1

I’m sorry.  I was thought it would be easy to improvise some psychoanalytical philosophy nonsense.  I give full credit to Freud and Lacan, it’s difficult material to come up with.

As always, while I am reading the text for this class i attempt to constantly consider how it relates to art (FINE more than DESIGN).  Maybe this is stating the obvious, but how the mirror stage becomes a structure for subjectivity seems to be a direct statement addressing why people see art the say they do.  I had a 3D Design course in undergrad and I remember on the first day the instructor telling us that everything designed three-dimensionally relates to the human body.  That leads me to conclude that everything two-dimensional (everything a person can see… how is that objectification skewed for the blind?) relates to our mind’s perception, and a system of symbols/language that we have developed.

So when we’re infants the mirror stage is what forms our ego?  This seems a bit trivial, and maybe taking the text too literally, but I can hardly remember looking at my own reflection as a child.  I don’t think i really knew what my face looked like or cared all that much.  However, I do distinctly remember walking into the bathroom one day and finally realizing i was tall enough to see my own eyes in the bottom edge of the mirror.  But by that age, has the mirror stage already ended?  Is this phrase used to just describe self-awareness, and an actual mirror is not required?  Like when an infant realizes how their hands and arms are part of themselves?  And the objects they touch with their hands are separate?

Maybe I am oversimplifying… sorry.

Time for bed.

The readings up till this week have been entirely focused on social and cultural struggles.  The readings for this week took a sharp turn towards psychoanalysis and the internal struggles of human beings.  Not to say they are unrelated, but it caught me a bit off-guard.  Upon reading the text, my first instinct was to smash my head through a window.  However, I probably would have had to go to the hospital for massive bleeding on top of having to pay for the broken window.  To solve this problem, I decided to take a nap (a Freudian sleep) and upon waking up I had a cup of coffee and was ready to respond.

If repressed memories can be awakened by word association and/or visual stimulation, I would like to focus on the latter to relate the readings directly to art.  One of the most common methods of visual stimulation  used in psychoanalysis is the Rorschach inkblot test.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: There are ten official inkblots. Five inkblots are black ink on white paper. Two are black and red ink on white paper. Three are multicolored. After the individual has seen and responded to all the inkblots, the tester then gives them to him again one at a time to study. The test subject is asked to note where he sees what he originally saw and what makes it look like that. The blot can also be rotated. As the subject is examining the inkblots, the psychologist writes down everything the subject says or does, no matter how trivial.

Ten Official Rorschach Inkblots

This is an obvious and broad parallel, but art often (always?) plays this same role of stimulating repressed memory from the unconscious.  In 1984, Andy Warhol did a series of Rorschach paintings.  Rosalind Krauss describes them as a “parodic vision” in response to color field paintings which had attempted “to move painting into the disembodied realm of pure opticality”.   In color field paintings, any interpretation relied solely on the response of the individual observer, saying more about the observer than the work itself.  Krauss continues, “Warhol pulled the plug on these sublime aspirations by reminding us that there’s no form so innocently abstract that it can’t be turned back into literary content”. SOURCE

Andy Warhol, "Rorschach", 1984

Below is an inkblot test plate that i created.  Please submit your response in the comments and I will tell you if you are crazy.

Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, takes the perils of mass culture and consumerism one step further than Adorno and Benjamin did.  Spectacle is taken to mean how mass culture and consumerism have created a false reality, where social life is defined by commodity.  This mode of living is cycled and promoted through mass media.  Lived experiences are transformed into spectacle.

Debord’s writings seem to have generated what became radical social anarchy against mass culture and consumerism.  Debord became the leading spokesperson for The Situationist International, an artistic and political movement that started in the late 1950s.  SI did not see themselves as a political movement, they sought to generate activity that created a situation, an epic or moment of life.  SI felt art was becoming to commercial and wasn’t serving their purpose of replacing passivity with playful affirmation.  SI initially focused on using art in their determination of subduing the spectacle.  They sought to work around the gallery system and predeterminded modes of art.  Early work included Asger Jorn’s modified paintings and metered industrial paintings of Pinot Gallizio.  The SI overall definition of art and artist helped form how the terms are defined in postmodernity.  SI members, when asked how art could be social replied:

“The time for art is over. The point now is to realize art, to really create on every level of life everything that hitherto could only be an artistic memory or an illusion, dreamed and preserved unilaterally. Art can be realized only by being suppressed. However, in contrast to the present society, which suppresses art by replacing it with the automatic functioning of an even more passive and hierarchical spectacle, we maintain that art can really be suppressed only by being realized.”

I think these ideas on art actually came to fruition shortly after when anarchy became a popular motif for art and music.  Eventually becoming part of the heirarchical spectacle itself: The Sex Pistols, Bansky, Paper Rad.

REFERENCES
Bureau of Public Secrets website, has translated some of the SI writings on art and art’s role in society.

Situationist International DOCUMENTARY FROM 1989

SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE FILM PART 1/9

Film is designed for reproducibility.  A packaged recording (VHS, DVD, AVI) of film contains watered-down authenticity.  What started as an original visual idea has gone through several interpretations and been edited into a montage.  That montage is eventually packaged and reproduced for mass comsumption.  The montage is the only way that the film  can exist.

I’m not entirely sure how animation fits in.  It also starts as an original visual idea that is then interpreted by a number of people, edited together, reproduced, packaged, and consumed.  For this response I created a bootleg of a scene from and episode of The Simpsons.  Does my homemade version have more authenticity than the one released by the studio?  Does it mean anything that one person created it, as opposed to an entire crew?

SIMPSONS BOOTLEG best pork chops

In contrast to film, a song is a complete abstract creation.  A single recording of a song (which is usually seen as the song itself) is reproduced and packaged much in the same manner that films are.  However, films require reproduction in order to exist.

To me, Walter Benjamin - in opposition to Adorno - seems to justify the importance of mass culture, and film in particular.  Mass culture, through reproduction, can permeate throughout society.  It can “mobilize the masses”.  That’s a source of power, be it good or bad.  The Dan Graham article describes Benjamin as demonstrating that “mass culture possessed a latent revolutionary power”.

SOME PROGRESSIVE ROCK —- “produce a sense of eternal newness”

I no longer understand art, but I do understand Hell.  It absolutely killed me to read Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory essay.  I had no idea what definition of art this was written under.  Maybe that just means I don’t know how I would define art, but I never thought I really needed to.  After reading the essay, I have no idea if I have ever actually created art.   Has my work ever related to the other or interacted with its opposite?  Has it sought to seclude itself from the world?  At its core, art has always felt to me like unnecessary physical material that will disappear at some point.  How big can our art museums get?!  Not to diminish what it means to people beyond just its physicality, but some people probably value the Mona Lisa over human life.  Adorno touches on this when he mentions the tension in art having “meaning only in relation to the tension outside”.  The only reason art holds value is because we relate it and any tension it has to ourselves.  Kant and Freud differed on their definitions of art, but agreed that art exists only for the artist and the individual who contemplates it.  Kind of like the tree falling in the forest.  So who really cares that art exists?  Don’t get me wrong, I love art.  I almost bought the t-shirt.  I just don’t care to validate its importance.  I got the feeling that Adorno was only speaking about “high art” and to “high art”.  This is fine, but in relation to today -  when art outside of “high art” plays an undeniably more significant societal role  - Adorno seems to be missing something.  I think I just got lost.

I had a much easier time getting something out of Adorno’s Culture Industry Reconsidered essay.  I think it directly relates to much of what was discussed regarding Marxism last week.  Perhaps Adorno sees it is a product of capitalism, because his disection of the culture industry comes across negative without balance.  The Editor’s Introduction states that culture industry produces “products geared to the larger demands of the capitalist economy”.  Adorno paints the consumer as a fool to the culture industry who doesn’t provide what the consumer wants, but rather convinces the consumer that they want what the culture industry has.  There is an agenda being imposed upon the consumer.  They adapt their agenda only in response to their own interests first.  It is part of a cycle of styles.  A style becomes cool through various forms of marketing and product placement, is sold to the masses where the style becomes its own advertisement… for a period of time.  Would style go out-of-style if it weren’t for the culture industry?  They need the cycle to continue in order to continue profiting.  This system has been around for so long and is so engrained into society that I think Adorno would have an updated response for today.  The lack of product quality that started within the culture industry has touched so many individuals that it now has historical and societal value.  The first generation of film, television, and music celebrities have died and have become historical figures.  The current celebrities are even more entrenched into the culture industry system.  Unlike Adorno’s time, the youth culture has a greater impact within the culture industry.   Today because of increased diversity there are many facets to culture industry, like ones geared primarily towards youth that ironicly responds to the other branches of culture industry.  For every Britney Spears t-shirt there was another Spear Britney t-shirt.

I don’t think Adorno would find today’s culture industry vacuous in the same way.  Side note: the previous statement doesn’t quite work following that image. Adorno also seems to think that nothing good can come from the neglect of individuality, but doesn’t address the importance of individuals being able to relate to each other.

Best critical show on TV, cancelled after first episode. Shortage of capital.QUESTION MARX with Karl Marx

Juan and I will be presenting a video, but here is some text to whet your appetite.  Enjoy!

Question Marx diagram

The service that art provides to the public typically overshadows the business generated by the by the purchase of supplies and equipment.  An artist will spend money on paint, inks, guitars, amplifiers, computers, et cetera, to create a product.  The end product will become part of the artist’s portfolio which in turn will generate a profit.  The end product also becomes exposed to the public, providing the service of art.  Art does something else more significant once it has been enveloped by the public: it becomes a vehicle for the Culture Industry.  Not only does the manufacturer of the equipment and supplies profit from the purchase of their product to create the art, but to a greater extent they also profit from the emphasis the art places upon the necessity of their product.

Between the artist, the public, and the manufacturer, who benefits the most from this cycle?  How does the notion of “benefit” today compare to how Marx would define “benefit”?  Can the abstract service art provides (entertainment, cultural progression, influence) be quantified?

TRANSCRIPT OF KARL MARX INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST ESTEBAN GARCIA

Karl Marx: Hello, and welcome to Question Marx.  Today we have Esteban Garcia who’s an artist here in Lafayette.  We’re gonna ask him some questions.  Esteban, thanks for being here.

Esteban Garcia: Hi Karl.  Can I call you Charlie?

KM: Yeah, sure.  No problem.

EG: Well, I’m very happy to be here today.  Thanks.

KM: Esteban, tell us about your work.  What do you do?

EG: I make flyers and I print t-shirts and sell them.  Lately I just made a lot of tapes for my friends the Minivans.  So I made those.  And I just finished painting a mural.  I also make some video work too.  So I guess I do different things.

KM: Tell us, what are those pieces of equipment you have there in the corner?

EG: A couple of things.  First the computer there that I use for storing files.  Music for a radio station.  And there is a radio transmitter and it has a mixer.  So the mixer also reamplifies the signal for the radio transmitter… makes it stronger.

KM: So basically how long have you been working on all this stuff that we see here today?

EG: For the good part of three years.

KM: Three years?  Do you have an estimate, or how much do you think you have spent?  Who pays for this?  Do you pay for this?

EG: Yeah.  Well, sometimes.  And there is a lot of people that pay for their own things.  A lot of the events are free events that I help organize.  I’m not paying for the gas for people to get there.  I’m not paying for the bands’ equipment.  I try to keep my work really cheap because I don’t have money.  I print things at school for free.  I try to just use materials that I can find for free.  I just got back from a residency and had been doing this project, so I had a stipend of money for materials that I was not expecting.  But that is through some sort of funding that is like art, like some sort of art organization that pays for it.

KM: What would you say you gain with this?  What, in terms of economy is your surplus value?  Oh, but first of all, do you work for yourself?  You don’t work for anybody else?

EG: No, I don’t work for anybody.

KM: So in this case you bring the capital and your work force.

EG: Yeah, in terms of capital I just printed those shirts with the puking mouth over the summer.   I pretty much worked in a bar for a weekend.  Made like fifty bucks.  And then ordered some shirts.  Printed the shirts.  Then I made three or four times what I made in the bar that night.  So I could pay rent with that money.  So my artwork, some of the stuff like the t-shirts are good for that kind of selling.

KM:  So in this case what do you gain with this work, Esteban?

EG: What do I gain? Just good times.  I’m not getting too much profit.  If I do get profit it just enough to maybe buy food.  That’s it.

KM: So it’s all about experience.

EG: Yeah, pretty much.  If I wanted to make money with my art I would definitely do something completely different.

KM: So how are you going to support yourself as a working man?

EG: I dunno.  I think that there have been ways it has been possible.  That’s why I teach at Purdue University.  It’s an activity that I do so I can make a living.  It’s something that I enjoy doing, but it’s separate from my artwork that you were asking me about.

KM: Well, Esteban, best of luck in the future.  What I see here is your body of work and in terms of a surplus value maybe this work being presented and future shows will help you get a better living or situation, right?

EG:  Yeah, I’m looking forward to it actually.  That wouldn’t be too bad.

KM: Excellent.  Well, best of luck.  Thanks to you people out there, the audience of Question Marx.  We’ll be here next week discussing the topic of dance.