I felt a little bit lost jumping into this project to be perfectly honest. The actual creative element I’ve been exploring enthusiastically; I found myself even with a surplus of ideas because of the delicious openness of the project itself. What I found daunting was locating a particular piece of sound art that could be said to inform my own approach to the topic, probably because my understanding of how one piece of art informs another is obviously more deeply engrained in fiction writing; digging through various sound art across the spectrum, I found myself asking: “How can any of these be directly related to my own understanding of the work, which derives from a place totally independent of any digital background or even audio/musical background?”
Charles Bernstein’s piece, “Piffle (Breathing),” felt like it opens from a very similar place to where I intend to go with mine, simply by virtue of its use of basic body sounds to set a particular mood. My own piece is still developing in its conception, simply because my instinct is the same with fiction, furniture and anything really: clutter the hell out of things until I feel like I need to dig my way out. Where it begins, though, is with a very simple concept. When I was a child, my family was not religious; I went to church approximately 4 times, and only so my parents could dump my brother and I off while they went golfing with my grandfather. Beyond that, my only religious experience was in something called vacation bible school, which was basically us being shunted off to a local church for a week to sing songs and reenact Bible stories with sock puppets. While we were there, a group of about 200 children would sit in this huge chapel and play “thunderstorm,” a game in which everyone would rub their palms together, then start snapping, then stomp their feet on the floor to simulate the sound of a rainstorm. This only worked with a bunch of people participating, and for me it began to embody everything I understood about organized religion: you cannot find God without lots of people, and sometimes we as individuals are forced to find him, even if we don’t want to.
My sound piece begins from the attempt to reenact that thunderstorm sound with the sound effects from a single person, namely, myself. I am going to do as much as I can through manipulating it, but I ultimately expect to fail, which is part of the point. On top of this, I intend to layer a narrative which I am currently writing, which begins with the sentence, “She found Jesus in a rainstorm, even though she was not looking for him.” Beyond that, I’m still deciding on any additional layers.
Back to Bernstein. What immediately struck me about this piece when I began listening to it was the very basic and yet disturbing place it opens. For a good moment, we get only the artist breathing. I was so uncomfortable about this after the first few seconds that I found myself actually skipping ahead to find what else the piece consisted of on the first listening. What it develops into is three layered pieces: the first, the breathing; the second, a conversation that begins after this; and the third, a conversation between the artist and someone else regarding the logistics of the actual piece. What drew me to this was two things. I was interested in the use of breathing in the piece for numerous reasons: the discomfort it causes, the background rhythm it creates, and the fact that it’s so simple and yet shapes the piece so definitively. Also, the meta-art tactic it uses with the one conversation makes us that much more aware of the piece’s art-ness, and this artistic self-awareness is always something I’m interested in.
I’ll talk about this more in class. But to round this piece out, I’ll leave you with a little AC/DC and admit that on some level I’m sure this informs my piece as well (forgive the video; it's a poor substitute for the original music video, which was difficult to find an accessible copy of):
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Trees falling in a presentation hall...
I’ve gone about seven different directions trying to put into some sort of context The Yes Men and last week’s Hacker Manifesto. I think seeing the film enabled me to better respect the ideology expounded upon in the reading, although more in the sense of using artistic expression in its most open interpretation as a means of stirring things up politically. I don’t think what bothered me so much about the Hacker Manifesto was the ideology itself, although its strictly Marxist idea of art being constantly co-opted I did resist somewhat, if only for the more romanticized reasons from Chabon’s essay I discussed last week: the pleasure inherent in any art form makes it ultimately too personal and thus impervious to being completely made into product. To put it simply, art finds a way. I imagine the Trickster of Chabon’s essay, in the bookstore or otherwise, defying convention, skirting expectations.
What I came out of last week’s viewing interested in was this idea of art’s adaptation into what might not normally be considered art for specifically political means. Which is not to say that doing so for other means isn’t interesting. Rather, I feel like, for myself, if there is no political or at least social vein to one’s work, some attempt to “stir things up,” then why am I paying attention to any convention you’re attempting to defy, or even why do I bother to write myself (I think I‘ve seen too much literary work, experimental fiction specifically, which seems to be experimenting for its own sake without saying anything remotely interesting with it)? I’m intrigued by the whole concept of political art, if only because the conventions it attempts to escape are frequently not merely conventions of form but of law and social behavior. How does one use art to express something political that moves people under a government that, let’s face it, doesn’t exactly encourage that sort of behavior?
So I started looking into some political art on the internet, focusing finally in two places: the Yes Man’s continued work pretending to represent organizations they find reprehensible, and the work of artist Ron English, specifically his political billboards. Something I found intriguing about the Yes Man’s more recent work was the effect that their notoriety had on their efforts, specifically how it preempted any shock value they made have had in front of a board of individuals ignorant to their usual hijinks. I was interested particularly in their infiltration of a Dow board meeting in 2005, since I did my undergrad in Mt Pleasant, MI, about fifteen minutes from where the meeting was held, and am well aware of how that company shapes the economy and political climate of the region. The response to their presence, specifically a whole slew of guards who apparently knew exactly who they were, while entertaining, brings up an important issue in their work: is this in fact the co-opting that the Hacker’s Manifesto is pointing to? Has the general alert to their existence and the success of their efforts to draw attention to corruption drawn so much attention that their methods themselves have become obsolete? Will it be necessary for them to find new ways to continue this work in order to get the same point across? How does one’s work remain vital when the very point of it--garnering media attention--makes the continued work impossible?
This is part of what drew me to the work I found of Ron English and other billboard and graffiti artists. The messages seem to be along similar lines in English’s work, although his seems to be a bit more partisan, specifically his endorsement of Obama. But the difference in medium means that there is both a smaller group of people contacted by a particular work but a greater amount of anonymity. The artist is not directly part of the work, and thus the risk involved in presenting that work is smaller, insomuch as that work is less likely to be prevented from presentation and thus has a higher possibility of reaching its target audience. The art is less persona and more representation and so the artist is not openly associated with his work. At the same time, though, the risk in the Yes Men’s choice of medium is coupled with a higher volume of press and therefore a greater impact if it succeeds. A billboard, however well-done, is easier to ignore. English’s work seems dependent also upon volume, but this volume derives from the number of billboards he creates and the location of presentation, in other words, the likelihood of press coverage due to the significance of its presence. In either case, a work is dependent to a certain extent upon press. If the audience reached is limited, the work is somewhat defeated in its intentions. As was discussed in the film, the initial presentation was not the point so much as the fallout it created; without fallout, the work is merely an extremely well-prepared prank.
All of this seems more resonant with explicitly political work, but it brings up a question for all art that attempts to break down barriers and create precedents: if no one hears you, does it fail? Who is art for: the artist or the audience? What does it mean to be a successful as an artist? I suppose that this is a question we all as individual artists must answer.
What I came out of last week’s viewing interested in was this idea of art’s adaptation into what might not normally be considered art for specifically political means. Which is not to say that doing so for other means isn’t interesting. Rather, I feel like, for myself, if there is no political or at least social vein to one’s work, some attempt to “stir things up,” then why am I paying attention to any convention you’re attempting to defy, or even why do I bother to write myself (I think I‘ve seen too much literary work, experimental fiction specifically, which seems to be experimenting for its own sake without saying anything remotely interesting with it)? I’m intrigued by the whole concept of political art, if only because the conventions it attempts to escape are frequently not merely conventions of form but of law and social behavior. How does one use art to express something political that moves people under a government that, let’s face it, doesn’t exactly encourage that sort of behavior?
So I started looking into some political art on the internet, focusing finally in two places: the Yes Man’s continued work pretending to represent organizations they find reprehensible, and the work of artist Ron English, specifically his political billboards. Something I found intriguing about the Yes Man’s more recent work was the effect that their notoriety had on their efforts, specifically how it preempted any shock value they made have had in front of a board of individuals ignorant to their usual hijinks. I was interested particularly in their infiltration of a Dow board meeting in 2005, since I did my undergrad in Mt Pleasant, MI, about fifteen minutes from where the meeting was held, and am well aware of how that company shapes the economy and political climate of the region. The response to their presence, specifically a whole slew of guards who apparently knew exactly who they were, while entertaining, brings up an important issue in their work: is this in fact the co-opting that the Hacker’s Manifesto is pointing to? Has the general alert to their existence and the success of their efforts to draw attention to corruption drawn so much attention that their methods themselves have become obsolete? Will it be necessary for them to find new ways to continue this work in order to get the same point across? How does one’s work remain vital when the very point of it--garnering media attention--makes the continued work impossible?
This is part of what drew me to the work I found of Ron English and other billboard and graffiti artists. The messages seem to be along similar lines in English’s work, although his seems to be a bit more partisan, specifically his endorsement of Obama. But the difference in medium means that there is both a smaller group of people contacted by a particular work but a greater amount of anonymity. The artist is not directly part of the work, and thus the risk involved in presenting that work is smaller, insomuch as that work is less likely to be prevented from presentation and thus has a higher possibility of reaching its target audience. The art is less persona and more representation and so the artist is not openly associated with his work. At the same time, though, the risk in the Yes Men’s choice of medium is coupled with a higher volume of press and therefore a greater impact if it succeeds. A billboard, however well-done, is easier to ignore. English’s work seems dependent also upon volume, but this volume derives from the number of billboards he creates and the location of presentation, in other words, the likelihood of press coverage due to the significance of its presence. In either case, a work is dependent to a certain extent upon press. If the audience reached is limited, the work is somewhat defeated in its intentions. As was discussed in the film, the initial presentation was not the point so much as the fallout it created; without fallout, the work is merely an extremely well-prepared prank.
All of this seems more resonant with explicitly political work, but it brings up a question for all art that attempts to break down barriers and create precedents: if no one hears you, does it fail? Who is art for: the artist or the audience? What does it mean to be a successful as an artist? I suppose that this is a question we all as individual artists must answer.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Oh You Theory People and your Wind Shouting...
I ran into Becky in the library today, which struck me as a little ironic considering I was going to the lab to blog on the extremely dense Hacker’s Manifesto, having failed to get my internet at home to bend to my will. Becky of course inquired as to how the class was going, and I of course immediately launched into my usual tirade about theory, this time with an additional paragraph explaining the lead-in of Marx and his own manifesto as it fed so directly into our reading for today. I am not anti-Marxist by nature, nor am I even anti-theory; I have always actually been intrigued by the ideology behind most of it, despite its tendency to embed itself in turgid, exclusionary prose. I find Marxism intriguing because the economic lens is one through which we must inevitably view the world, since it permeates our lives so entirely. But cultural economy, or put another way, cultural capital – this is a concept that just turns my stomach.
Explaining the whole thing to Becky, who is herself a Lit student and thus ass deep in all of that theory jazz, I think I was able to put my finger on what I found so difficult about the whole thing: the obsolescence of the style, in its obvious imitation of Marx, cheapened the argument and made the idea itself seem obsolete. Ironic, I think, because the whole point it seemed to make was that the whole theory of Marxism, which proved impractical at least inasmuch as “communism” didn’t pan out, needed to be updated because it was outmoded. Paying homage to him or just raping the original style – couldn’t decide in the end.
What I think got left out of the argument in its rush to explain the commodification of art and the hacker’s responsibility to fill a continuous need for the “abstract” was something Becky and I both agreed lies at the center of the artistic experience: the individual. While I think this attempts to address that notion, I’m not sure it quite makes it, or, more accurately, ends up contradicting itself in its adherence to the language of universals borrowed from our dear old Karl. We’re both reader response people through and through; in other words, we are both big believers in throwing out the application of a lot of traditional theory and coming back to a very basic, personal place. While I agree that commodification can determine what we experience and how we do so, I feel like this is a bit of a cop-out. The personalization of creative experience, both from the creative and receptive perspectives, can only be co-opted so much. Art is not material. And no amount of “vectoralist” intervention will make this so, not entirely anyway.
On a slightly divergent but similar note, I’ve just begun reading Michael Chabon’s recently released book of essays about reading and writing called Maps and Legends. He has some thoughts along similar lines: puts in his two cents about theory, fiction as entertainment, the fallacy of genre, and how much we seek to over-analyze art and categorize the hell of it. A lot more readable (and yeah, I’ll give you that he’s one person whose prose I will consistently pimp for anyone who’ll listen). It felt like a good companion to this piece for me. The essay is called “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” for anyone interested.
A couple things from the essay that stuck me as particularly relevant, for those interested:
With regard to his feelings as to why he reads/writes:
"I could uncork some stuff about reader response theory or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could abduce Kafka's formula: 'A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.' [...] But in the end--here's my point--it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles."
How so-called genre writers of any tack distinguish themselves:
"When it comes to conventions, their central impulse is not to flout or to follow them but, flouting or following, to play."
The Trickster in the evolution of fiction:
"Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way the novel has done so often in its long history, the short stort must, inevitably, go."
These are particularly relevant if you are willing to play a little bit with his references to "entertainment" and the "short story" as his ideas gestate.
Explaining the whole thing to Becky, who is herself a Lit student and thus ass deep in all of that theory jazz, I think I was able to put my finger on what I found so difficult about the whole thing: the obsolescence of the style, in its obvious imitation of Marx, cheapened the argument and made the idea itself seem obsolete. Ironic, I think, because the whole point it seemed to make was that the whole theory of Marxism, which proved impractical at least inasmuch as “communism” didn’t pan out, needed to be updated because it was outmoded. Paying homage to him or just raping the original style – couldn’t decide in the end.
What I think got left out of the argument in its rush to explain the commodification of art and the hacker’s responsibility to fill a continuous need for the “abstract” was something Becky and I both agreed lies at the center of the artistic experience: the individual. While I think this attempts to address that notion, I’m not sure it quite makes it, or, more accurately, ends up contradicting itself in its adherence to the language of universals borrowed from our dear old Karl. We’re both reader response people through and through; in other words, we are both big believers in throwing out the application of a lot of traditional theory and coming back to a very basic, personal place. While I agree that commodification can determine what we experience and how we do so, I feel like this is a bit of a cop-out. The personalization of creative experience, both from the creative and receptive perspectives, can only be co-opted so much. Art is not material. And no amount of “vectoralist” intervention will make this so, not entirely anyway.
On a slightly divergent but similar note, I’ve just begun reading Michael Chabon’s recently released book of essays about reading and writing called Maps and Legends. He has some thoughts along similar lines: puts in his two cents about theory, fiction as entertainment, the fallacy of genre, and how much we seek to over-analyze art and categorize the hell of it. A lot more readable (and yeah, I’ll give you that he’s one person whose prose I will consistently pimp for anyone who’ll listen). It felt like a good companion to this piece for me. The essay is called “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” for anyone interested.
A couple things from the essay that stuck me as particularly relevant, for those interested:
With regard to his feelings as to why he reads/writes:
"I could uncork some stuff about reader response theory or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could abduce Kafka's formula: 'A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.' [...] But in the end--here's my point--it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles."
How so-called genre writers of any tack distinguish themselves:
"When it comes to conventions, their central impulse is not to flout or to follow them but, flouting or following, to play."
The Trickster in the evolution of fiction:
"Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way the novel has done so often in its long history, the short stort must, inevitably, go."
These are particularly relevant if you are willing to play a little bit with his references to "entertainment" and the "short story" as his ideas gestate.
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