The Manifesto (Continuation) (This Is Going To Take A While)
We are all familiar with the concept of performance. A performer, or a group of performers, behaves in a certain way for an audience, so as to evoke or bring about an experience which in some way deviates from that of quotidian reality, or non-performance.
The most obvious medium of performance is that of theater: in theatrical events (plays, movies, TV shows, etc.), humans (or anthropomorphized beings) are the performers, and the performance takes place within a space concretely localized in physical space and time. If it isn’t solidly contextualized - e.g., if the setting is metaphysical - that quality is usually brought to the forefront of the audience’s attention as something strange or unusual.
Less-obvious media of performance include visual art and music: here the performer is not so easily identifiable. If we are to consider concerts within the realm of “theatrical events,” then the musicians themselves would be the performers. Whom, or what, are the performers inside of a piece of recorded music? An abstract painting - especially, one with no reference to an artist? I would say that the performer is the sound or the visual image itself. Abstract art and instrumental music provide the best cases for demonstration of my greater point, here, because they remove all but a faint trace of the human element within their scope. It is not the artist or musician who performs: it is the tangible sound or image, unbound to an origin. The performance space is constituted by the audience - a person, the consumer of the work - and the performer. The presence of an originary point is not only unnecessary, but (I would say) is dangerous insofar as it runs the risk of undermining the work’s performative qualities - stealing the spotlight, so to speak. For example, I’d argue that it’s more meaningful to view a famous film - Citizen Kane, for example - without knowledge of the meaning of “Orson Welles.” Orson Welles is not the performer in Citizen Kane; Beethoven is not the performer in his ninth symphony, and Picasso is not the performer in Guernica. In each instance, the content operates freely from its progenitor.
This principle is complicated by the concept of language and writing. The complication arises from the fact that language seems inextricably bound to an originary point: meaning. Each word has its definition - this is not true of each sonic frequency, brushstroke, or subtle gesture of the actor’s brow. Meaning will always be the father, so to speak, of language, except in cases of nonsensical or made-up words. Right?
Well, somewhat. Of all the written arts, poetry disrupts meaning to the greatest extent. Still, one gets the sense - or at the very least, one is taught to have the sense - that poems try to convey something beyond itself in some way. A love poem in which no direct reference to a beloved, in which no word explicitly related to love, is ever displayed, for example.
Epiphantom: The New New
Hello, all!
I’d like to make a formal, public gesture declaring my commitment to this website as a space for theoretical writings. This blog post is that gesture.
I have created a custom domain for what was formerly tinyspirits.tumblr.com. You are currently looking at writings.epiphantom.com (the parent website, epiphantom.com, is intended as a display of the things I do and make, and the things the people I love do and make, spanning all forms of media, although at present it’s nothing more than a nascent ambition).
Welcome to EPIPHANTOM In the weeks that follow, I plan on restructuring all prior content according to the express mission: this website is to serve as a place for writing. There’s no need for another image-based site in my web experience or yours. My desire is to promote diversity on the internet, instead of adding another layer of the same sort of paint to be absorbed into the homogenized grayness into which most image-based websites are eventually subsumed.
I hope people will be interested in transmissions from the center of the universe, Missives about writing, art, and… well, a lot of other things, like robots, the internet, social media and organization, and the woods. I adore the woods. I live in the woods.
I also live here at this website. Welcome to my home.
Love,
Emma
Raoul Eshelman, author of Performatism, or The End of Postmodernism (link opens in new window, so click away!) applies the theories laid out in his text to the work of Ukrainian photographer Alina Kisina .
It’s worth a watch, if you’re at all interested in current trends in aesthetic theory, or if you’ve ever asked yourself the question “what comes after irony?”
Eshelman’s commentary in this video is typical of his writing style, which is wonderfully clear and elegant, especially considering how subtle and complex his argument is. He also has a lovely speaking voice.
Happy Wednesday,
Emma
Weather report says:
Irresponsible optimism, involuntary acts of belief
Collective growth
the provision of a framework in which experiences of transcendence can be articulated and shared
Abandoning the worship of money and capital accumulation, choosing
cooperation over competition
The recognition and valuation of the irreducible subject both in and out of a context-providing structure, such as that furnished by culture
Growing one’s own food
Loving oneself unconditionally so that one might love others similarly
Refusing irony and exteriority; celebrating difference in ways of knowing and regarding reality, truth, and information
Standing together
Dancing together
Love is self-sustaining, self-justifying, anti-rational and a necessary exponent of the existence of all sentient life forms. It’s the answer to every question.
The beginning is near; we are the one’s we’ve been waiting for.
(image re-blogged, text pieced together by me, inspired by many many many)
(Source: metaconscious)
From Kevin S. Fitzgerald’s “The Negative Eschatology Of Maurice Blanchot”
In his seminal work The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature, Jean Paulhan asked, “What is literature?” In response to this question, Blanchot published late in 1941 the essay “How is Literature Possible?” (BR 49-60).[1] With this essay, Blanchot commenced upon an investigation into the ontology of literature that reached its apex within the pages of The Space of Literature. After the Liberation, Sartre likewise began to respond to the question of literature. He did this primarily through essays he authored and published in his new journal Les Temps modernes. In 1947, Sartre collected these essays, which espouse the necessity for politically committed literature (littérature engagée), into a volume entitled, What is Literature? In this work, Sartre writes:
The function of a writer is to call a cat a cat. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modern literature is a cancer of words. It is perfectly all right to write ‘horse of butter’ but in a sense it amounts to doing the same thing as those who speak of a fascist United States or a Stalinist national socialism. There is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which, I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics which resound about them and which are made up of vague meanings which are in contradiction with the clear meaning (228).In this passage, Sartre takes a phase that Bataille used in the Inner Experience to champion Surrealism, “horse of butter,” as the epitome of the poetic vagueness he despises. Invoking the call for referential directness Boileau made in his first Satire, “j’appelle un chat un chat et Rolet un fripon” (I call a cat a cat and Rolet a rascal), Sartre attacks the autotelic stance that informs Bataille’s phrase.[2] Sartre attacks the autotelic or art for art’s sake stance because poets of this school, such as Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, largely approached literature as an autonomous space, one that remains exempt from the ethical considerations of the world. It is predictable that Sartre would attack such a stance, for literature or art created for its own sake more often than not resists committing itself in an overt manner to political action and engagement. Sartre also dismisses autotelic writing because he contends that its meaning relies largely upon private association. Finding it incapable of the direct and clear communication required by political writing, he regards Surrealism as representative of the frivolous nature of poetry in general. Believing that prose alone possesses the capacity to directly use the word for political causes, Sartre states, “the poet does not utilize the word, he does not choose between [its] different sense” (WL31).
In opposition to the Sartrean program of littérature engagée, Blanchot published in the January 1948 issue of Bataille’s Critique his important essay, “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” (Literature and the Right to Death (WF 300-344)). By polarizing or dichotomizing in this longish essay the space of literature and the political action of the world, Blanchot defends poetic ambiguity against Sartre’s denunciation. Speaking of the equivocal nature of the written word, he responds to Sartre: “the cat is not a cat, and anyone who claims that it is has nothing in mind but this hypocritical violence: Rolet is a rascal” (WF 311). In this manner, rather than view the double meaning that coalesces around the written word as a sickness the writer must combat, Blanchot implies that ambiguity alone allows the reader to develop a sincere dialogue with the text, via interpretation. Standing Sartre’s argument on its head, he states, “deceit and mystification not only are inevitable but constitute the writer’s honesty” (WF 310).
I took this photo of myself because I got a hair cut! The image quality of this photo is really not that great!
Ignore the image quality: this is a post about art and the meaning of cliches.
I read David Foster Wallace’s book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again a few years ago. Thinking that it might be useful for supporting my thesis, I re-read his essay E Unibus Plurum (link is to a forty-page pdf; don’t click it if you aren’t interested in reading it- it will take a while to load). I was shocked to see how my response had changed: a few short years ago, I thought this essay was totally genius. Now, it strikes me as unnecessarily dark and very dated.
I’ve been thinking about my new-found distaste for the essay. I’m pretty sure it’s because Wallace begins by talking about writers. His humor is targeted directly at the kind of person who will laugh at the phrase: writers are creepy people. In other words, he’s targeting the essay at other writers. So many people see themselves as writers that this was kind of a genius move on his part: it makes his audience feel intelligent for understanding the quirky, vaguely sad self-observations (the underlying joke being, of course, that Wallace himself is a writer).
Wallace’s work offers commentary on the state of the times in which they were written. Up until his death two and a half years ago, that was Right Now. His works tend to offer commentary on the phenomenon of irony in postmodern media; this irony is based around self-conscious awareness of cliches and other culturally “assumed” knowledge.
Maybe that’s my problem with the work: it really feels like the kind of thing I would have found genius two and a half years ago, before I started thinking really, really hard about categorizations and the meaning of the word cliche. In the process of castigating pop culture for its dependence on cliches, Wallace turns the act of consuming media into a cliche.
This is really dangerous, I think. As someone with a considerable renown as an intellectual figure, when Wallace talks about What It Means To Consume Media, people listen. When you state that something - anything, an action, person, time period, art movement - has a specific set of qualities, you give it a certain kind of power. This power is in constancy: I can talk about the modernist movement today in the same way I talked about it yesterday. Because discourse is what makes a set of ideas exist, the ability to be talked-about over a period of time is the greatest quality for the life of pretty much anything. Turning something into a cliche is, in many ways, the greatest bestowal of honor. It’s like saying that something is so successful at what it does that it has reached a level where it symbolizes its own function. For example, the cliche of young people posting photos of themselves to the internet symbolizes the function of posting a photo of yourself to the internet. If I were to make some self-consciously witty comment about how typical young-person of me it is to upload a photo I took of myself to teh interwebz, I would really be obscuring the fact of its function, which is that I want people on the internet to see my new haircut. This has nothing to do with whatever it is that makes it a stereotype.
I would argue that nothing anybody does has anything to do with a stereotype - this includes the reviled act of American Media Consumption (the essay refers specifically to media-consuming habits of the population of the United States).The truth is, cliches prevent us from seeing the world for what it is. This really troubles me because it’s part of a culture that wants people to buy into a stable identity based around their tastes. If you “know” your tastes, you’re more likely to consume products that will support that part of who you are. All of a sudden, you have a stake in being someone with an interest in specific kinds of music, clothing, cars, whatever. It’s because it’s “you”.
Such is the curse of a culture that supports individualism based not on our actions, but on the way we present ourselves to the world. It’s the illusion of self-control, and the ability to “choose” who you are based on a set of things that fall into easily-definable cultural cliches and categorizations is incredibly appealing to a lot of folks.
Of course, we are not the music we listen to (that’s always a hard one for me to swallow), or the cars we drive, or where we went to school, or a cool shirt. Art that is truly beautiful to me stands outside of a need for people to identify themselves with it, because it requires the ability to enjoy something without seeing it as a part of who you are. Then you can really hear the music or see the movie. You don’t need to criticize it because you don’t agree with its content, or it doesn’t “fit” you. It just is what it is.
Then again, I’m a bit of a utopian. I think it’s very possible for everybody to love all art. Why not? Why is it not possible? Every work of art, writing, music, and so on does something a little bit different. There is beauty in the fact that it is different. Outside of a cultural framework, or any cloud of concepts and commentary that comes with the work, there exists something made by an artist that satisfied her or him. That act of producing is so beautiful that I think it warrants a reconsideration of the constraints on enjoyment of beauty.
Maybe I should go wash my hands now. And my neck. And my ears. Pink dye everywhere!
emma
A few weeks ago, I found myself on the train from Poughkeepsie, New York (my home town!) to Manhattan. I found a fascinating traffic light on the way there. Look at how yellow it is! What audacity!
As engrossing as this encounter was, this is not a post about a traffic light.
I have the idea to choreograph a dance piece in which each of the dancers is given a set of headphones. The music playing through these headphones would correspond with music listened to by one audience member. The audience members would be instructed to turn the music on and off at will.
The dancers would be taught various steps, but the order in which they put them together and the times of rest would be up to them.
Essentially, this would be an exercise in seeing the way music and dance come together to create a work in tandem without one prefiguring the other, in design - an art piece left entirely to chance.
The dancers can never be certain of the starts and stops of the music; the audience might be informed that it is an audience-participation piece, but they (ideally) wouldn’t know what their role in the work would be.
ESKIMEAUX is pretty amazing. I saw them play here on Saturday. I’d call them “shoegaze”, but if you don’t like shoegaze or don’t really know what shoegaze is, what would that do? They’re great! Just listen to them!
Google Art Project
This is something about which to keep both your eyes open. The critical responses and artworks inspired and catalyzed by the ability to view, say, Van Gogh’s Starry Night in remarkably high resolution will be interesting, to say the least. I wonder what museums they’ll catalogue next?
This is Kenny Millions : his work blew my mind last night. Genre classification is negative insofar as it assumes a single ground by which both artist and audience might began to derive meaning from the work. I was drawn to the performance via word of mouth about “some cool jazz thing”; because arts of improvisation fascinate me, I decided to go out for it.
In this case, genre classification added gravity to an experience that might have been better classified as simply “other”. Classifications and identification of qualities that inhere to any body - person, body of work, body of experience - assume staticity through time.
This problematizes dynamism and fluidity of experience; it concretizes memory, the operations of which are, I believe, not wholly divorced from the work of a memoirist. For greater poetry to exist in memory, genre classifications should be carefully considered before applied to the work of an art maker which holds singular meaning for the art lover.
