Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Is this thing on?
I'm just testing to see if this thing still works. If it does, (and if you're reading this, it does), y'all are about to get an eyeful.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
text/plastics/performance and economics
It is possible that the recent emphasis on the text-arts and on icons in the form of celebrities, and the false conflation of icons to plastic status (the .mp3 replacing the album, graphic design supplanting painting, celebrity worship replacing spiritualism as a mass cult [or mass sub-cult, a la K Records]) was triggered by economic conditions. Can it be entirely accidental that the shift away from manufacturing and towards the so-called service economy in the United States and Europe coincided with a popular retreat from physical manufactured goods*? Of course, technology has made both of these developments possible, and should not be neglected as perhaps the prime cause; nevertheless, the interrelation of consequents is complex and worthy of study.
The transition from industrial to post-industrial economy in the wealthiest nations on the globe is temporary, or at the very least based on a consequent increase elsewhere and therefore both illusory (sweep the dirt under the rug where we can't see it, to Asia) and unjust (sweep the dirt out of the window onto our neighbors below, onto the broken backs of Chinese youth)*; the elimination of labor and sweat and industry and of making physical objects for mutual economic benefit of producer and consumer will not disappear. Its importance may diminish with increased automation, and it will diminish as a burden to mankind, but the hard permanent fact is that real objects will continue to be produced and required for the forseeable future, for as long as the corporeal continues to embody consciousness -- and this is perhaps an infinite time*. The transition to the virtual workplace, etc., is temporary and illusory; telecommuting, now and henceforth a sensible option for many professions thanks to technology increase, will never be a sensible option for a surgeon, or a chef, or a sculptor. There will always remain niches (perhaps not these, but certainly some) in which a real physical presence and performance of a task is rewarding, satisfying, and productive of value and joy and quality surpassing that available by text-transmission, both for the producer and the consumer. Physical presence is not something we would benefit from shedding, nor could we shed it if we tried. To paraphrase Christ: "The working artisans will always be among you." Whether or not they will be poor, as the original saying went, is up to the particular social system in which they live. This assumption that the physical and spiritual and mental should be divorced and mutually subdued and animous, was inhereted in our society from the ancient Greeks, passed down by the writings of Paul and the teachings of Christian theology. (Is it present in Semetic teachings - the Talmud, Torah, etc.? Is it present in the spirituality of Hindus, or of Australian pre-European occupation natives?)
Similarly, there are fault lines in the hastily constructed facade of the "digital world" or "cyberspace" or "virtual reality" or whatever one's decade calls it. The meme (popularized viral idea) of digital-real equivalence has taken hold over a large portion of thinkers, from art historians to physicists to spiritual gurus who posit the existence of "Akashic fields" in which the sum total of all experince is stored in bit form via quantum mechanical processes (Lazslo). This flowering of thought may lead to some legitimate breakthroughs, but it is not universally applicable in all directions. As evidence, one need look no further than the world of art photography, where prints, even digital ones, signed by the artist fetch fantastic sums but digital .zip files of the same image, color balanced in exactly thesame way, do not.
Details are attainable in digital form but they are not salable - that is, they posess no intrinsic economic worth, or certainly not as much as the physical object, approved and signed by the artist, does. Why is this? Because the artist alone has the final say in whether or not the physical object -- THE THING FOR WHICH THE DIGITAL FILE EXISTS AS A PRE-SUBSTRATE, AN EGG, A GENE -- has been correctly transsubstantiated out of the realm of mere information and into the physical. This final process is still seen as necessary in the world of art, and in our times the cult of art is perhaps just as good a fount from which to draw the philosophical, metaphysical, and spiritual conclusions of humankind as any church or theology department. (See: Rothko Chapel for fusion of high art and religion).
Why is the richest element of our society willing to expnd massive sums of money for items that are in principle infinitely replicable and by traditional economics therefore worthless? (the bad end of the suppply-demand curve..) Because, at the highest levels of scrutiny, it is impossible to pass of a digital forgery as reality, no matter how many of our senses may be fooled by the illusion. There is perception, and then there is Truth, at least so the art market would seem to conclude.
The false conflation of the digital/iconic and the real stems from one of the tenets of modernism (?), that art came to be as a process of icon manipulation and cognition (Herbert Read, Icon and Idea), and that the sum total of human endeavor can be reduced to symbols.
I first bristled against symbolism when it ws presented to me as such in middle school. I never accepted the notoion that an object, even one conjured in a text, could truly and completely "stand for" something in its totality, or that its total function was revelaed by such standing. I sensed and intuited and realized that there ws something more, that this explanation was not rigorous or nuanced enough, and that to characterize the vast world of literature, itself a text art, as merely symbolic would be a gross oversimplification. (In text art the mutual interactions of contexts provides access to the sublime and escape from the infinitely-repeatable, as text, like performance, is experienced in a linear fashion and therefore exists as much in the mind as it does on paper or screen; it is a vector from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader, and in the minds is where the sublime happens, the triggering of experience; that is the power of the word. Draw lines from every letter in this text to every other letter in this text and a small fraction of this complexity will be illustrated.)
How much more an oversimplification occurs in the world of the visual arts, and of recorded media? If objects are seen as holding no real value, a society's concept of reality must then begin to unravel, and we see this process happening all around us. Money is the primary example. The finance "industry" is reductionism as an art form, and the grandest scam.
It seems that some key points raised can be boiled down to:
1) a assertion that while aspects of the physical universe may be discrete the world AS A WHOLE is not atomistic but continuous and infinitely complex at the deepest levels, at least insofar as consciousness and human experience is concerned, and that this property ought to be integrated into human conception of art as defined in entry one (meaning any human endeavor - making ratchets, cooking, dancing, writing letters.)
2) a rejection of the ancient Christian notion of purifying the sinful physical man, the spirit, and killing the body, a pointing out that this underlies many assuptions made in our society and is the prime cause of many recent developments and the direction of progress of technology (and the reason so many great thinkers [Thoreau] mistrust technology and progressivism, which are in fact mainly good forces), and the assertion that it should be replaced with a world view which incorporates the corporeal and the sublime as non-mutually-exclusive -- perhaps even mutually dependent -- entities. The mental is the physical is the spiritual.
3) a calling into question of the notion that all physical work is a burden and non-beneficial and should be eliminated as rapidly as possible (Victorian?)
Side note -- the incorrect divorce of mental/physical/spiritual, is this akin to my divorce of text/plastics/performance? Might they, too, be more correctly described as different aspects of the same force? Perhaps, but the distinction is still useful here, just as the Greek partition is useful in spirituality or psychology or philosophy when classifying urges and/or their sources, and in neither case is it necessary to declare the superiority of one over the other, merely a knowledge and confidence of navigation of the three realms and their intersections (e.g. sex, e.g. childbirth, e.g. sharing a meal <--> e.g. writing a song (text + performance), e.g. architecture (graphics + sculpture), e.g. screenprinting (icon + physical manifestation of icon yielding something that surpasses the icon).
The transition from industrial to post-industrial economy in the wealthiest nations on the globe is temporary, or at the very least based on a consequent increase elsewhere and therefore both illusory (sweep the dirt under the rug where we can't see it, to Asia) and unjust (sweep the dirt out of the window onto our neighbors below, onto the broken backs of Chinese youth)*; the elimination of labor and sweat and industry and of making physical objects for mutual economic benefit of producer and consumer will not disappear. Its importance may diminish with increased automation, and it will diminish as a burden to mankind, but the hard permanent fact is that real objects will continue to be produced and required for the forseeable future, for as long as the corporeal continues to embody consciousness -- and this is perhaps an infinite time*. The transition to the virtual workplace, etc., is temporary and illusory; telecommuting, now and henceforth a sensible option for many professions thanks to technology increase, will never be a sensible option for a surgeon, or a chef, or a sculptor. There will always remain niches (perhaps not these, but certainly some) in which a real physical presence and performance of a task is rewarding, satisfying, and productive of value and joy and quality surpassing that available by text-transmission, both for the producer and the consumer. Physical presence is not something we would benefit from shedding, nor could we shed it if we tried. To paraphrase Christ: "The working artisans will always be among you." Whether or not they will be poor, as the original saying went, is up to the particular social system in which they live. This assumption that the physical and spiritual and mental should be divorced and mutually subdued and animous, was inhereted in our society from the ancient Greeks, passed down by the writings of Paul and the teachings of Christian theology. (Is it present in Semetic teachings - the Talmud, Torah, etc.? Is it present in the spirituality of Hindus, or of Australian pre-European occupation natives?)
Similarly, there are fault lines in the hastily constructed facade of the "digital world" or "cyberspace" or "virtual reality" or whatever one's decade calls it. The meme (popularized viral idea) of digital-real equivalence has taken hold over a large portion of thinkers, from art historians to physicists to spiritual gurus who posit the existence of "Akashic fields" in which the sum total of all experince is stored in bit form via quantum mechanical processes (Lazslo). This flowering of thought may lead to some legitimate breakthroughs, but it is not universally applicable in all directions. As evidence, one need look no further than the world of art photography, where prints, even digital ones, signed by the artist fetch fantastic sums but digital .zip files of the same image, color balanced in exactly thesame way, do not.
Details are attainable in digital form but they are not salable - that is, they posess no intrinsic economic worth, or certainly not as much as the physical object, approved and signed by the artist, does. Why is this? Because the artist alone has the final say in whether or not the physical object -- THE THING FOR WHICH THE DIGITAL FILE EXISTS AS A PRE-SUBSTRATE, AN EGG, A GENE -- has been correctly transsubstantiated out of the realm of mere information and into the physical. This final process is still seen as necessary in the world of art, and in our times the cult of art is perhaps just as good a fount from which to draw the philosophical, metaphysical, and spiritual conclusions of humankind as any church or theology department. (See: Rothko Chapel for fusion of high art and religion).
Why is the richest element of our society willing to expnd massive sums of money for items that are in principle infinitely replicable and by traditional economics therefore worthless? (the bad end of the suppply-demand curve..) Because, at the highest levels of scrutiny, it is impossible to pass of a digital forgery as reality, no matter how many of our senses may be fooled by the illusion. There is perception, and then there is Truth, at least so the art market would seem to conclude.
The false conflation of the digital/iconic and the real stems from one of the tenets of modernism (?), that art came to be as a process of icon manipulation and cognition (Herbert Read, Icon and Idea), and that the sum total of human endeavor can be reduced to symbols.
I first bristled against symbolism when it ws presented to me as such in middle school. I never accepted the notoion that an object, even one conjured in a text, could truly and completely "stand for" something in its totality, or that its total function was revelaed by such standing. I sensed and intuited and realized that there ws something more, that this explanation was not rigorous or nuanced enough, and that to characterize the vast world of literature, itself a text art, as merely symbolic would be a gross oversimplification. (In text art the mutual interactions of contexts provides access to the sublime and escape from the infinitely-repeatable, as text, like performance, is experienced in a linear fashion and therefore exists as much in the mind as it does on paper or screen; it is a vector from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader, and in the minds is where the sublime happens, the triggering of experience; that is the power of the word. Draw lines from every letter in this text to every other letter in this text and a small fraction of this complexity will be illustrated.)
How much more an oversimplification occurs in the world of the visual arts, and of recorded media? If objects are seen as holding no real value, a society's concept of reality must then begin to unravel, and we see this process happening all around us. Money is the primary example. The finance "industry" is reductionism as an art form, and the grandest scam.
It seems that some key points raised can be boiled down to:
1) a assertion that while aspects of the physical universe may be discrete the world AS A WHOLE is not atomistic but continuous and infinitely complex at the deepest levels, at least insofar as consciousness and human experience is concerned, and that this property ought to be integrated into human conception of art as defined in entry one (meaning any human endeavor - making ratchets, cooking, dancing, writing letters.)
2) a rejection of the ancient Christian notion of purifying the sinful physical man, the spirit, and killing the body, a pointing out that this underlies many assuptions made in our society and is the prime cause of many recent developments and the direction of progress of technology (and the reason so many great thinkers [Thoreau] mistrust technology and progressivism, which are in fact mainly good forces), and the assertion that it should be replaced with a world view which incorporates the corporeal and the sublime as non-mutually-exclusive -- perhaps even mutually dependent -- entities. The mental is the physical is the spiritual.
3) a calling into question of the notion that all physical work is a burden and non-beneficial and should be eliminated as rapidly as possible (Victorian?)
Side note -- the incorrect divorce of mental/physical/spiritual, is this akin to my divorce of text/plastics/performance? Might they, too, be more correctly described as different aspects of the same force? Perhaps, but the distinction is still useful here, just as the Greek partition is useful in spirituality or psychology or philosophy when classifying urges and/or their sources, and in neither case is it necessary to declare the superiority of one over the other, merely a knowledge and confidence of navigation of the three realms and their intersections (e.g. sex, e.g. childbirth, e.g. sharing a meal <--> e.g. writing a song (text + performance), e.g. architecture (graphics + sculpture), e.g. screenprinting (icon + physical manifestation of icon yielding something that surpasses the icon).
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Art is any intentional product of human action. It exists as one of
three types: text, performance, and sculpture.
Text art consists of anything with the property that it can be described by a subset of pre-defined semantic symbols. Prose, poetry, graphic design. They are inspecific with regard to time and space, and are, in principle, infinitely repeatable. They are born of context and exist only in relation to one another.
Performances consist of behaviors that are born of and fade within the moment. They are time-localized and time-specific. Examples may include dance, acting, reading, and music. They are also born of context and exist as tensions, but in addition carry their own self-weighted value as actions in and of themselves, for themselves, intrinsic.
Sculptures are place localized and place specific, or at the least object-localied and object-specific. The existence of scultpure is predicated on the existence of objects, as unique from one another.
Our society has placed increasing emphasis on the text arts, and it may be that one of the results is the decreased importance attached to place and to the existence of art objects.
- - - -
"You're right to fear Sunday evenings. You're experiencing something real, and the fact that you know what you're feeling, or realize it as something particular, a pain distinct from others, is a credit to your prescience. But you'll learn, as you age, that what you're feeling isn't to be feared, exactly. One can glory in it, much as one marvels at the elegance of a predator consuming its catch, or the majesty of an exploding star as it extinguishes life in its sphere. These are terrors, but in them there is also beauty, and even from them - perhaps only from them - life grows."
(Millburn, NJ --> New York Penn)
three types: text, performance, and sculpture.
Text art consists of anything with the property that it can be described by a subset of pre-defined semantic symbols. Prose, poetry, graphic design. They are inspecific with regard to time and space, and are, in principle, infinitely repeatable. They are born of context and exist only in relation to one another.
Performances consist of behaviors that are born of and fade within the moment. They are time-localized and time-specific. Examples may include dance, acting, reading, and music. They are also born of context and exist as tensions, but in addition carry their own self-weighted value as actions in and of themselves, for themselves, intrinsic.
Sculptures are place localized and place specific, or at the least object-localied and object-specific. The existence of scultpure is predicated on the existence of objects, as unique from one another.
Our society has placed increasing emphasis on the text arts, and it may be that one of the results is the decreased importance attached to place and to the existence of art objects.
- - - -
"You're right to fear Sunday evenings. You're experiencing something real, and the fact that you know what you're feeling, or realize it as something particular, a pain distinct from others, is a credit to your prescience. But you'll learn, as you age, that what you're feeling isn't to be feared, exactly. One can glory in it, much as one marvels at the elegance of a predator consuming its catch, or the majesty of an exploding star as it extinguishes life in its sphere. These are terrors, but in them there is also beauty, and even from them - perhaps only from them - life grows."
(Millburn, NJ --> New York Penn)
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