Velvet Howler
Allowing suppression of the Timecube
Bertrand BIinois from the poster competition for the First NSK Citizens’ Congress. There is an interesting critique of the conference at Mute, some of which I’ve quoted below.
While there are interesting examples of how NSK State citizens have taken up and articulated the NSK State in new ways (some examples of this could include Christian Matzke’s Maine-based Retrograde Reading Room or Charles Kraft’s NSK dinnerware), the congress also showed how a participatory platform and convergence of varying backgrounds and ideas does not necessarily produce anything new or interesting.vii Or to put it another way, while the gurus of the post-Fordist creative networked economy might fetishise relationality and participation, the formal process of collaboration emerging from projects attempting to make relational aesthetics genuinely participatory does not in itself guarantee interesting results.
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If the goal of the avant-garde was, and perhaps still is, to merge together art and everyday life, it is clear that this does not always go the way that might have been expected or hoped for in advance. The outcomes of artistic projects that spill over into directly political and social forms often do so in messy and ambivalent ways. One could suggest, then, that a politically responsive political-art practice, rather than trying to imagine forms of intervention free of contradictions or unpredictable effects (if that would be possible or desirable) would rather be one that creates ethical relations within the unforeseen effects generated when the artistic, political, and social recombine in unforeseen ways.
Reblogged from Rogueish
| — | The Communist Manifesto. |
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From Ruby Cohn’s intoduction to Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett. The fundamental tenets they share might be a good articulation of Modernism. Or they might be a reductive articulation of Modernism. Or they might be my borrowed, aspirational articulation of Modernism. |
Obey and Betrayal
Shepard Fairey has been accused of plagiarism again, which is the sort of dialogue he wants us to enter. There is nothing wrong with repurposing images and any argument with that point is likely to come from someone who isn’t informed enough to meaningfully interact with. That point of illusionary contention serves only to expand Shepard Fairey’s media profile as a cheeky troublemaker.
The real problem with Shepard Fairey comes from his role as clothing manufacturer. The Obey clothing line betrays the message of the art. Originally, the Obey campaign confronted people with a repeated image that had no direct correlation to product or political motivation and they would substitute their own meaning.
From Shepard Fairey’s Obey manifesto:
“The OBEY sticker attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the sticker and their relationship with their surroundings. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the product or motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with the sticker provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer’s perception and attention to detail. The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker. Because OBEY has no actual meaning, the various reactions and interpretations of those who view it reflect their personality and the nature of their sensibilities.”
That is an interesting idea and initially it was executed well.
Taken at this level, the campaign is clever especially when interacting with historical propaganda. We take meaningful images and concepts and reduce them to messageless mass media. This is a clever commentary on how media and advertising function, how they drain once powerful forces of meaning.
However, as soon as you actively market a product under an Obey label and begin to sell things for a profit, what you have is essentially a self-aware, but nevertheless insidious advertising ploy masquerading as art. It makes me think that Shepard Fairey, like the fool character Mr. Brainwash in Exit Through the Gift Shop, never really believed his method and is essentially a cynical opportunist playing a postmodern game.
In other words, the same postmodern game Fairey was critiquing by adopting the methods of mass media is now his burden.
Now, you might argue that this act is another clever commentary on art in our postmodern era, but it’s not. And that Shepard Fairey is playing a Warhol-like character, but he’s not.
Being aware of the inherent contradictions in your work and responding to them, does not change the fact that such contradictions exist, it is simply a method of comfortably excusing your behavior.
Reblogged from bhaskism
The Stalinist-ethos par excellence
In June of 2002 the Beijing Evening News—a state-controlled publication with a circulation of over one million—translated a story entitled “Congress Threatens to Leave D.C. Unless New Capitol Is Built.” The article claimed that Congress would leave Washington for Memphis, Charlotte or Toronto…
Source: bhaskism
The publisher would be failing in his duty if he were not to warn the reader that while Mishima’s lonely masterpiece is splendidly conceived and written and paced - and not without humour - its final effect is bleak beyond words. Confessions of a Mask offers no hope. As The Times Literary Supplement puts it:
‘This agonising story of childhood and adolescence reports with a terrible honesty the inner life of a boy entranced by sado-masochist fantasy. This leads to depp homosexual obsessions… a huanting, hopeless tale, told without self-pity but with true art and with a desperate humour.’
Mishima himself more than live out his fantasies - his last once-and-for-all gesture was to have himself ritually beheaded.
Confessions of a Mask is a unique experience… thank heavens. As a regular diet it would be gruesome indeed. But it’s likely to remain a lonely masterpiece.
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From the first page of Grafton Books’s 1988 version of Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima. What indignity to have a warning of this sort preface your work! |
Glenn Gould, the eccentric Canadian musical philosopher and pianist, plays J.S. Bach’s Partia #2.
