The Ego-Centric Art World is Killing Art
Showing posts with label Relationships as Units of Exchange. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Relationships as Units of Exchange. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Friday, December 12, 2014
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Saturday, October 16, 2010
How Should a Person Be, Teenager Hamlet and Don’t Go to School: MFA, Oct. 14, 2010
Granted, it is a bit much to be cataloging articles that include the mention of one's own projects. But it was bound to happen: my theoretical concerns have a lot to do with what's happening in a space beyond these reassuringly (to me) static, impersonal texts. Carl Wilson's most excellent article on being "life-sampled." Of critical interest: relationships as units of exchange.
Source.
"There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going. More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else."
Tonight, in a couple of hours, three of my closest friends are holding a launch party for the results of their three respective long-term projects, a novel and a movie and an album.
They all examine the relationship of life to art, using the people and places right around them as their subjects and sources. (It’s less obvious with the album, but we tend to forget that almost always when a band plays, we’re listening to a set of dynamic relationships in space; the “community band” element of Tomboyfriend emphasizes that.) They also served as each others’ characters and aides-de-camp.
The launch party takes place in a bar basically across the street from the apartment where I lived in the years they worked on their projects. And that seems apt. I was a participant too: I played a plump, pasty-skinned, city-slickened swamp ghost in the play-within-the-movie, the “ex-husband” around the peripheries of the action of the novel, and the music critic doing what he can do for friends-within-a-band. But mostly I was in another room, at middle distance, framed by a window, finishing my own project, my own book about art and life, which likewise involved them, though mostly less visibly. I almost wish I hadn’t finished it so long ago so I could be launching it tonight too. Instead, I marked the occasion by moving out of that apartment.
There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going.
More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else. Most of us aren’t 1970s funk musicians so we’re probably more accustomed to being on the other side. We may be accustomed to being linked or quoted in social media, but being sampled is a more intense sense of self-displacement. To adapt to your life being sampled may be a 21st-century necessity.
That it’s a little harder than you expect gives you sympathy for some of those older artists who take the copyright issue so much more personally than the scope of the financial issues involved. There’s the nightmare vision of being disassembled and reassembled atom by atom in a Star Trek transporter, but put back together in an utterly wrong order. (See also Cronenberg’s The Fly.) Or the subtler nightmare of being reassembled perfectly and yet no longer being “right.” Yet it is also deeply meditative, allowing oneself to be copied, mistranslated: When you think, “Wait, that’s no longer myself,” the next natural step is to wonder whether it was yourself to begin with and whether there is such an animal as yourself or whether you would recognize it if you met it.
So sweetly intoxicating to dare to think not, especially when a crowd of people are daring it with you (out of bravado, perhaps, too proud to be the one to say no, but it doesn’t really matter why, only that you did). It’s becoming the done thing, perhaps, in commercial and fame-economy culture to look at reality as a liquid commodity, worth more in exchange than in savings. But when what you’re buying with it is a dispersal rather than a magnification of self, it seems different enough to matter, which may be as far away from a dominant paradigm as one is usually able to get.
Source.
"There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going. More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else."
Tonight, in a couple of hours, three of my closest friends are holding a launch party for the results of their three respective long-term projects, a novel and a movie and an album.
They all examine the relationship of life to art, using the people and places right around them as their subjects and sources. (It’s less obvious with the album, but we tend to forget that almost always when a band plays, we’re listening to a set of dynamic relationships in space; the “community band” element of Tomboyfriend emphasizes that.) They also served as each others’ characters and aides-de-camp.
The launch party takes place in a bar basically across the street from the apartment where I lived in the years they worked on their projects. And that seems apt. I was a participant too: I played a plump, pasty-skinned, city-slickened swamp ghost in the play-within-the-movie, the “ex-husband” around the peripheries of the action of the novel, and the music critic doing what he can do for friends-within-a-band. But mostly I was in another room, at middle distance, framed by a window, finishing my own project, my own book about art and life, which likewise involved them, though mostly less visibly. I almost wish I hadn’t finished it so long ago so I could be launching it tonight too. Instead, I marked the occasion by moving out of that apartment.
There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going.
More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else. Most of us aren’t 1970s funk musicians so we’re probably more accustomed to being on the other side. We may be accustomed to being linked or quoted in social media, but being sampled is a more intense sense of self-displacement. To adapt to your life being sampled may be a 21st-century necessity.
That it’s a little harder than you expect gives you sympathy for some of those older artists who take the copyright issue so much more personally than the scope of the financial issues involved. There’s the nightmare vision of being disassembled and reassembled atom by atom in a Star Trek transporter, but put back together in an utterly wrong order. (See also Cronenberg’s The Fly.) Or the subtler nightmare of being reassembled perfectly and yet no longer being “right.” Yet it is also deeply meditative, allowing oneself to be copied, mistranslated: When you think, “Wait, that’s no longer myself,” the next natural step is to wonder whether it was yourself to begin with and whether there is such an animal as yourself or whether you would recognize it if you met it.
So sweetly intoxicating to dare to think not, especially when a crowd of people are daring it with you (out of bravado, perhaps, too proud to be the one to say no, but it doesn’t really matter why, only that you did). It’s becoming the done thing, perhaps, in commercial and fame-economy culture to look at reality as a liquid commodity, worth more in exchange than in savings. But when what you’re buying with it is a dispersal rather than a magnification of self, it seems different enough to matter, which may be as far away from a dominant paradigm as one is usually able to get.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Susan Sontag: On Photography
From: On Photography.
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads--as an anthology of images.
Les Carabiniers - Jean-Luc Godard
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.
For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.
While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.
That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads--as an anthology of images.
Les Carabiniers - Jean-Luc Godard
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.
For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.
 |
| Diane Arbus |
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.
While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.
That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Of Prodigal Snapshots: the Fantasies of a Teen-Aged Crazy
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Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Gary Lutz Online
Fiction on Web del Sol.
Gary Lutz is a writer I have grown acquainted with from the Internet. The sentences he writes are often of technical interest in the most surprising ways. A brief (but in no way comprehensive) survey of elements at play in his work which I find enjoyable and/or poignant:
- All his torturing with grammar, the micro-attentiveness to the materiality of language are echoed lock-step with thematic concerns. This is experimental writing that is *about something.*
- For all its self-referentiality and playfulness with the expectation and outcome of a sentence, his fiction is tempered by deep human concern. It is also very sad.
- If I were to suggest provisionally what the main concern is, my guess might be that Gary Lutz is attuned to how the grammatical elements that define our linguistic present come to be; that there may be social analogies that can shed some light on the most virulent of them.
- One gets a sense in Lutz of everything shrinking. In the strictly ruled micro-lives of Gary Lutz's highly ritualized characters, work is omnipresent but it holds no human purpose. Play, on the other hand, is omnipresent but banal, joyless, attended to with mechanic compulsion.
- The architecture of this world is inescapable, descriptions of it haunted by terminology of the office-place, playground, corporate campus, elementary school no matter what landscape or interior is being described.
- Sentences are often without subjects. Objects move from one place to the other, with the deliberate suppression of any descriptive window into the human agency normally involved. Or else the usual relationship between subject and object, animate and inanimate noun, is reversed. Tables operate on the people sitting at them, etc. The quality and duration of what one human life can hope to impress upon another is about that of warmth as imprinted by a hand on a fridge door.
- Unlikely parts of grammar function emotionally; conjunctions, articles.
- Familiar objects, especially objects whose name and use implies an institutional, domestic or office-like existence, often are transformed into verbs.
- A character's subjectivity might become another wholly unrelated subjectivity without the conventional attendant struggles and developments to get there.
- Human relationships are basically procedural. The basic condition between two subjects trying to relate is akin to a form of social autism.
- Any word, especially a neo-logism or buzz term, especially if it has functionalist or mechanistic overtones, any word that implies shrinking or further advances in technological discreteness is rejigged to describe the most private and intimate of activities.
- Industry-scale categorization permeates the smallest niche of human life.
- Micro attentiveness to the associative overtones of the smallest parts of language. i.e. the products of divorce become step-people. The prefix step- begins to govern their relationship will all other things.
- Instead of plot, lateral substitution of event for event, state for state, without emotional release or forward (or even backwards) movement on the subject's part. Things become other things, hopelessly, endlessly, over and over. Neither epiphany nor transcendence follows. Just an ever-plateauing state of change.
- Notable, Lutz's use of elements akin to what in film is Mumblecore: bad grammar, deliberately tortured grammar, generalization to the point of coyness, kid-like reductions in word and phrase complexity, some of which even anticipates twitter-speak.
- I might guess some literary sources for this style include Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein.
Gary Lutz is a writer I have grown acquainted with from the Internet. The sentences he writes are often of technical interest in the most surprising ways. A brief (but in no way comprehensive) survey of elements at play in his work which I find enjoyable and/or poignant:
- All his torturing with grammar, the micro-attentiveness to the materiality of language are echoed lock-step with thematic concerns. This is experimental writing that is *about something.*
- For all its self-referentiality and playfulness with the expectation and outcome of a sentence, his fiction is tempered by deep human concern. It is also very sad.
- If I were to suggest provisionally what the main concern is, my guess might be that Gary Lutz is attuned to how the grammatical elements that define our linguistic present come to be; that there may be social analogies that can shed some light on the most virulent of them.
- One gets a sense in Lutz of everything shrinking. In the strictly ruled micro-lives of Gary Lutz's highly ritualized characters, work is omnipresent but it holds no human purpose. Play, on the other hand, is omnipresent but banal, joyless, attended to with mechanic compulsion.
- The architecture of this world is inescapable, descriptions of it haunted by terminology of the office-place, playground, corporate campus, elementary school no matter what landscape or interior is being described.
- Sentences are often without subjects. Objects move from one place to the other, with the deliberate suppression of any descriptive window into the human agency normally involved. Or else the usual relationship between subject and object, animate and inanimate noun, is reversed. Tables operate on the people sitting at them, etc. The quality and duration of what one human life can hope to impress upon another is about that of warmth as imprinted by a hand on a fridge door.
- Unlikely parts of grammar function emotionally; conjunctions, articles.
- Familiar objects, especially objects whose name and use implies an institutional, domestic or office-like existence, often are transformed into verbs.
- A character's subjectivity might become another wholly unrelated subjectivity without the conventional attendant struggles and developments to get there.
- Human relationships are basically procedural. The basic condition between two subjects trying to relate is akin to a form of social autism.
- Any word, especially a neo-logism or buzz term, especially if it has functionalist or mechanistic overtones, any word that implies shrinking or further advances in technological discreteness is rejigged to describe the most private and intimate of activities.
- Industry-scale categorization permeates the smallest niche of human life.
- Micro attentiveness to the associative overtones of the smallest parts of language. i.e. the products of divorce become step-people. The prefix step- begins to govern their relationship will all other things.
- Instead of plot, lateral substitution of event for event, state for state, without emotional release or forward (or even backwards) movement on the subject's part. Things become other things, hopelessly, endlessly, over and over. Neither epiphany nor transcendence follows. Just an ever-plateauing state of change.
- Notable, Lutz's use of elements akin to what in film is Mumblecore: bad grammar, deliberately tortured grammar, generalization to the point of coyness, kid-like reductions in word and phrase complexity, some of which even anticipates twitter-speak.
- I might guess some literary sources for this style include Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Naive Capitalism
We are not here to make friends.
An interesting thing about this millennium's first decade's love affair with reality television is how quickly the genre used up the conceit it was, somehow, in documentarian fashion, about an unbarred relationship between camera and life, yet continued to draw an audience specifically fascinated with its reality version of a game show.
Instead of the promised reality, which mostly took the form of scheduled asides, scenarios akin to amateur improv games and actors whose vitality was in their unschooled quipping and mugging, the genre is more notable for the universe it inaugurated of its own evolving, self-recycling conventions. Internally self-regulating, the show's hastily turned-over casts came equipped in advance with strict truisms learned from earlier runs, communal experience evolved into iron-clad rules of engagement. Participants quickly sorted themselves into either the heroes or villains of sentimental tele-novels. Hastily shedding any semblance of individual subjectivity, the borrowed morality and self-conscious aims of these shows' villains, part talent show competitors, part talk-show trash of a debased (yet voluntarily simulated) humanity, when allotted their moment before the camera, often echoed this shrewd popular conception (see clip above) of how one is supposed to be, in reality, which is a game, which requires winners, and winning is good. Call it naive or folk capitalism.
*
Yet why not make friends? And why this fascination with the question? For the question is at the pounding, wounded heart of all this plaster-thin, byzantine interpersonal wrangling. Is it misrecognition of the terms of the game: that to deny subjectivity and worthiness in others nearby is tantamount to emptying the playing field, thereby handing over victory to the most nihilistic of competitors by default? Is it magical, ritualistic logic? That to sacrifice friends in this small game of a television series is to gain them all in the bigger one, that worthy field of engagement these contestants often address in the footlights, when talking to camera, "America." Is it a defensive or apprehensive gesture: One prefers, ultimately, the fair shot of a game than the trauma-inducing, commonly emotionally asymmetrical experience of a friend? Is it compulsive: We often destroy what is actually good for us in favor of what we think is good, based on whispers, limp willingness towards seductions and candy-coated delusions? Or are these contestants simply the bottom-crop of aspiring entertainers whom they appear to be, trying to clock in some valuable screen time, deftly intuiting that an audience needs a structure and that there's power in repetition and the familiar, like melodramatic plotting and a tag-phrase. Moreover, that to portray a cringe-worthy stock villain might be the more lucrative route to an on-screen career than actually "winning" these games; witness the fame industry's main tools for fascination: hating on, and scandal. For, important to note, as a strategy, not making friends only ever yielded mixed results (community-building or the esteem of one's peers was as valid an angle to win on these shows). That the contestants would be or should have been aware of this make their ad nauseum quoting of the platitude all the more quizzical. Not making friends was never a winning strategy in itself.
An interesting thing about this millennium's first decade's love affair with reality television is how quickly the genre used up the conceit it was, somehow, in documentarian fashion, about an unbarred relationship between camera and life, yet continued to draw an audience specifically fascinated with its reality version of a game show.
Instead of the promised reality, which mostly took the form of scheduled asides, scenarios akin to amateur improv games and actors whose vitality was in their unschooled quipping and mugging, the genre is more notable for the universe it inaugurated of its own evolving, self-recycling conventions. Internally self-regulating, the show's hastily turned-over casts came equipped in advance with strict truisms learned from earlier runs, communal experience evolved into iron-clad rules of engagement. Participants quickly sorted themselves into either the heroes or villains of sentimental tele-novels. Hastily shedding any semblance of individual subjectivity, the borrowed morality and self-conscious aims of these shows' villains, part talent show competitors, part talk-show trash of a debased (yet voluntarily simulated) humanity, when allotted their moment before the camera, often echoed this shrewd popular conception (see clip above) of how one is supposed to be, in reality, which is a game, which requires winners, and winning is good. Call it naive or folk capitalism.
*
Yet why not make friends? And why this fascination with the question? For the question is at the pounding, wounded heart of all this plaster-thin, byzantine interpersonal wrangling. Is it misrecognition of the terms of the game: that to deny subjectivity and worthiness in others nearby is tantamount to emptying the playing field, thereby handing over victory to the most nihilistic of competitors by default? Is it magical, ritualistic logic? That to sacrifice friends in this small game of a television series is to gain them all in the bigger one, that worthy field of engagement these contestants often address in the footlights, when talking to camera, "America." Is it a defensive or apprehensive gesture: One prefers, ultimately, the fair shot of a game than the trauma-inducing, commonly emotionally asymmetrical experience of a friend? Is it compulsive: We often destroy what is actually good for us in favor of what we think is good, based on whispers, limp willingness towards seductions and candy-coated delusions? Or are these contestants simply the bottom-crop of aspiring entertainers whom they appear to be, trying to clock in some valuable screen time, deftly intuiting that an audience needs a structure and that there's power in repetition and the familiar, like melodramatic plotting and a tag-phrase. Moreover, that to portray a cringe-worthy stock villain might be the more lucrative route to an on-screen career than actually "winning" these games; witness the fame industry's main tools for fascination: hating on, and scandal. For, important to note, as a strategy, not making friends only ever yielded mixed results (community-building or the esteem of one's peers was as valid an angle to win on these shows). That the contestants would be or should have been aware of this make their ad nauseum quoting of the platitude all the more quizzical. Not making friends was never a winning strategy in itself.
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