There is an interesting video of Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of the 4th Tate Triennial, explaining his conception of Altermodern. Bourriaud is also writing a book, The Radicant. From the publisher’s site:
To be radicant: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing. The author extends radicant thought to modes of cultural production, consumption and use. Looking at the world through the prism of art, he sketches a “world art criticism” in which works are in dialogue with the context in which they are produced.
“And if twenty-first-century culture was invented with those works that set themselves the task of effacing their origin in favor of a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrootings? This process of obliteration is part of the condition of the wanderer, a central figure of our precarious era, who insistently is emerging at the heart of contemporary artistic creation. This figure is accompanied by a domain of forms and by an ethical mode: translation, whose modalities and cardinal role in contemporary culture this book seeks to enumerate.”
I suppose the key difference is the Radicant sounds more inclusive while the Nomad is more deliberately making decisions about what should be discarded. Both concepts appeal since they seem to work against any kind of cultural studies approach that great ouroboros and cul-de-sac of academic thought.
Another book to add to the reading pile.
Robert Drewe & Charles Meere
I was a little fuzzy on the details but after seeing a painting last week I was reminded of a story.
Robert Drewe was scouring through the Art Gallery of NSW looking for an artwork that might suit a book cover. He happened upon ‘Australian Beach Pattern’ by Charles Meere. The AGNSW describes the work as “perennially popular” but until Drewe pulled it from storage it had been “lost”.
That’s the story. Whether it is true, I’m not sure.
Looking at the AGNSW details for the painting they list exhibitions that include the work. After an initial exhibit in 1952, it wasn’t seen again until 1982. The Bodysurfers, Drewe’s collection of stories was published in 1983 using the painting for the cover. The timeline seems to match, taking into account the time involved to create the cover, print the book, etc.
Like Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’ the painting has become an iconic representation of beach culture but more than that it seems a very nationalistic piece. The child raising a shovel from his father’s shoulders looks almost like a parody of Soviet-era posters, and the father, as well as the man holding the towel in the centre, have a military posture.
Most striking, to me, is the light. It isn’t so much that there is a problem with the direction of the sun but that each person is made up of light and darkness. The painting has depth and perspective, a layering of groups. But there is also tension on each person with the way shadow seems to curve the figures.
Justine
Tonight I finished reading Justine, the first book of the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. The final section:
The cicadas are throbbing in the great planes, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines—so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings; or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them—I mean a black patch, a green fingerstall, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings…
Soon it will be evening and the clear night sky will be dusted thickly with summer stars. I shall be here, as always, smoking by the water. I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter unanswered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Kind of Blue
During a recording session (later released as ”58 Miles’), American jazz musicians John Coltrane (1926 – 1967), Cannonball Adderley (1928 – 1975), Miles Davis (1926 – 1991), and Bill Evans (1929 – 1980) perform in the studio, New York, New York, May 26, 1958. (Photo by Frank Driggs Collection/Getty Images)
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the first recording session for Kind of Blue, the Miles Davis album.
The lauds and honours for the album are well known. It has been placed in the US National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress. It is the best selling jazz album, and Miles Davis album, of all time and continues to sell 5,000 copies every week.
It is also considered by many to be the best and most influential jazz album, assembling some of the greatest musicians of the era at the height of their careers. The album features John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley on alto saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, and Miles Davis on trumpet.
Bill Evans, who had been a part of the Davis sextet and was replaced by Wynton Kelly, features on every track except ‘Freddie Freeloader’ and has been given credit for co-writing ‘Blue in Green’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’. In his autobiography, Davis wrote: “I… planned that album around the piano playing of Bill Evans.” Evans also wrote the liner notes that go some way to explaining the improvisational nature of the recordings:
This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflections, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician.
Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording.
…
Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a “take.”
Why blog?
I’ve had a blog for several years, many more than the archives might suggest. Originally hand-rolled, then published with Movable Type, now WordPress. It has been a patchy and infrequent thing. I’ve lost content and deleted items that I felt offered too stark a characterisation or too fundamentalist political ideas.
There have never been any illusions about the process. It is entirely for me. Anything truly personal is offline, penned into books. What is written here is a collection of quotes, links, definitions, things that I have wanted to keep – like a scrapbook. And now I find myself asking my I bother keeping a blog at all.
If it is personal then perhaps it is better kept in a rolling document on my computer or, since it is mainly a collection of quotes and online ephemera poorly compiled, in any of the numerous digital offerings such as Delicious or Google Notebook, two applications that I already use.
And further to the question is why anyone would blog at all.
At a recent conference on social media the presenter distinguished between the “old” generation (above 25) and the new generation of online users by stating that the older users consider everything they do online to be private unless they make it public while the younger generation consider everything they do to be public unless they make it private. It was just the kind of pithy nugget of new media information I wanted to take back to the office.
But it offers no reason, save the ubiquity of Facebook and internet applications, why this should be the case. Blogs, Live Journals, etc are all becoming mainstream. Businesses no longer use them to present a hip, understanding front. They can offer a more personal means of communicating with the public. Which is bollocks; they are a company. The blog might be written by a person but when did we mistake meeting and speaking with somebody with reading a blog post?
I guess that can come down to some semiotic question, some communication studies theoretical argument about how we are ever able to communicate “personally”.
I read a lot of blogs. I have a vast, often interconnected, OPML list of sites and blogs served up through Google Reader. And here the process makes sense.
The inernet is huge and the amount of content, and by that I mean the stuff that I want to read, has become a gigantic rush of white noise. So I gather around various people who, for one reason, post or link, I consider worth watching and this digital collective whittles down the internet into something more manageable.
Some of these people are largely human editors in the way that Yahoo! and Looksmart used to be human editors – serving up links with brief descriptions. Others, like Jason Kottke or Merlin Mann, sometimes accompany links with the kind of insight or original idea that actually contributes to the whole endeavour.
Yet the “whole endeavour” still worries me.
Tonight I read an excellent review in the New Yorker. I really enjoy book reviews – it is one of my favourite sections in the Guardian Weekly. A good review can give an insight into the author, the subject, the historical perspective, even the basic philosophies and thinking behind the act of creating. And tonight, as fantastic James Wood’s analysis of Richard Yates and Revolutionary Road was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have spent the energy reading the actual book.
The New Yorker article was printed from the web, sourced via a blog, and it struck me how incredibly removed from actual things the internet is making me. It goes back the sheer mass of content online but is it better, for me, to have read one thousand blog posts that point to one hundred reviews of books and movies and restaurants than it is to have read a single book, seen a movie or had dinner? An utterly rhetorical and stupid question. I imagine that speaking briefly about a dozen books and films of which I am acquainted through reviews, or even just scores, makes for a wide-ranging, wine-swilling, onanistic dinner party conversation and ultimately a cipher of the individual.
Perhaps it is generous to suggest that blogging was ever anything more, but for the vast majority of people who (like me) aren’t contributing to the conversation, blogging and posting links seems to be a narcissistic urge for publication. It doesn’t even fall into the category of bad art – at least that has the potential to improve and become something greater. Posting links will always be a meta-process.
So where does that leave me? As the person writing the blog isn’t it better to have actually created something worthwhile, something wholly new than spent years compiling and cataloguing links and articles that other people wrote and that further people have already catalogued?
I suppose it comes down to finding a balance between reading and archiving the mass of information that ultimately points to books and films the majority of which go unread and unseen and then stepping away from that entire process and watching a film, working on a book (whether reading or writing) and either doing or creating something.
Which isn’t a long-winded declaration leading to closing my journal. It might mean that I have to think about ways to incorporate what I’m already doing with bookmarks and notebooks so that it keeps this whole process relevant. Or maybe it means that I write longer more thought out, original ideas, start some new fiction, perhaps, and publish something more considered, more real than links.
Oh, and the answer, is because it is easy. It is much easier to blog than it is to create something. And yet it is, it exists, published online and public as a testament to having done something even if blogging is nothing.
Joseph Conrad and the treachery of writing
— We live, as we dream – alone.
“I have never learned to trust it. I can’t trust it to this day … A dreadful doubt hangs over the whole achievement of literature.” Thus wrote Joseph Conrad, in an essay published in the Manchester Guardian Weekly on December 4 1922. Long before Auden was telling us poetry makes nothing happen, or Adorno was saying there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, Conrad was questioning – fundamentally – the political and moral utility of writing. Yet this was a writer who drew the approbation of FR Leavis, the pre-eminent British supporter of the view that literature could play a role in the maintenance of civilisation. In 1941, Leavis described Conrad as being “among the very greatest novelists in the language – or any language”.
But in the realm of twitching eyeballs, even Stewart Lee Allen can’t hold a candle to Honoré de Balzac, the model for every espresso–swilling writer who has followed in his jittery footsteps. What hashish was to Baudelaire, opium to Coleridge, cocaine to Robert Louis Stevenson, nitrous oxide to Robert Southey, mescaline to Aldous Huxley, and Benzedrine to Jack Kerouac, caffeine was to Balzac.
The habit started early. Like a preppie with an expensive connection, he ran up alarming debts with a concierge who, for a price, was willing to sneak contraband coffee beans into Balzac’s boarding school. As an adult, grinding out novels 18 hours a day while listening for the rap of creditors at the door, Balzac observed the addict’s classic regimen, boosting his doses as his tolerance mounted. First he drank one cup a day, then a few cups, then many cups, then 40 cups. Finally, by using less and less water, he increased the concentration of each fix until he was eating dry coffee grounds: “a horrible, rather brutal method,” he wrote, “that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins.” Although the recipe was hell on the stomach, it dispatched caffeine to the brain with exquisite efficiency.
And indeed I shall anchor, one day—some summer morning of sunflowers and bougainvillaea and arid wind— and smoking a black cigar, one hand on the mast, turn, and unlade my eyes of all their cargo; and the parrot will speed from my shoulder, and white yachts glide welcoming out from the shore on the turquoise tide.
And when they ask me where I have been, I shall say I do not remember.
And when they ask me what I have seen, I shall say I remember nothing.
And if they should ever tempt me to speak again, I shall smile, and refrain.
— Randolph Stow
I’ve realised lately that I’m nowhere near where I’d hoped to be. I think that this is a delayed reaction to my birthday.
This last semester at university has been a complete waste of time. Not simply in the active sense that I didn’t get anything from the course but because until recently I had the momentum to pursue certain thoughts and ideas, and now, deadened and dulled by such tedious and preliminary ideas that were presented this semester I’ve lost any sense of direction.
I had wanted to continue reading Derrida. I wanted to pursue his notion of transcending logocentrism, understand the reasoning behind his specific elevation of Ezra Pound and Stéphane Mallarmé. I wanted to read Hegel and Proust and continue taking notes on Zizek.
Instead, I’ve found myself having to read Trainspotting and being encouraged to do close reading in some imbecilic reversal.
Last weekend I re-read some essays in The Necessary Jungle by David Brooks. There are some essays that tend toward Rimbaud’s call for a “systematic and deliberate derangement of the senses” a kind of demand for a remaking of language. Of course, as Paul de Man suggests in Blindness and Insight (I think that the specific essay is called ‘Literary History’), it is impossible to be entirely ‘new’.
Jameson (and also Patricia Waugh) argue that there is a postmodern tendency toward works that retain a sensibility that can be recognised by readers while offering only a small degree of what might be considered avant-garde. This way the work is accessible while offering something of the ‘new’.
What Brooks suggests, using the terms centrifugal and centripetal (centrifugal being the ‘new’; works that fly from the centre), is that for a book to be accepted and published it must retain sufficient centripetal influences. The danger is that for most people reading and understanding a novel tends toward identifying the elements within the novel that are already present within themselves. The new, centrifugal ideas are smothered by the centripetal in the readers’ attempt to make sense of the text.
I’m off to the library to read Paul de Man’s Allegories of reading: figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. I may or may not return.
In the past few days, I’ve read and watched a few things that have really effected/re-enforced my thinking. I started re-reading Pablo Neruda. He was a Marxist poet from Chile who abhorred fascism and fought in Spain against Franco. He died in 1973 a few days after the death of Allende and the rise of Pinochet in Chile. He was ill but essentially gave up on life when he heard of the coup.
Not all of his poetry is protest, but a series in Canto General (1950) talks about the US government. The US history of supporting fascism against communist or vaguely socialist governments in South America is well documented. I always assumed that it was the rabid fear of communism that motivated these policies but, as the Cuban nationalisation of sugar plantations proved, the fear was as much economic. The US has systematically raped South America of resources and supported fascist dictatorships to ensure that this was possible.
Then the other night I watched a program about infighting between the FBI and the CIA and how neither organisation was able to foresee September 11. Apparently, there had been warnings. Direct warnings. The Germans (specifically Gerhard Schroeder) had told the US government that terrorists were going to hijack commercial planes and use them as weapons. But the most interesting aspect was the connection between the Bush family and the Saudi Kingdom. US policy has been to ignore the Saudi stance on terrorism and human rights. The CIA was instructed not to spy on Saudi Arabia because they were an ally. The policy is shaped primarily by American petroleum interests in the middle east. That former President George Bush, current President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney have amassed fortunes from their dealings in the Middle East should be cause for considerable concern. I had always suspected that the leftist argument, that the Gulf War was primarily about oil, was hyperbole but the evidence and the “prior art” of US foreign policy has kind of confirmed the idea.
In pursuit of economic advantage and stable markets, the US has directly contributed to the misery of millions. The life that is enjoyed by the West is propped up by the rest of the world. It is no wonder that dissidents across the world want to destroy the US and see the taking of civilian life as justified. The complicity of the West (its people not just politicians and governments) in the imperial relationships maintained with “the rest of the world” is being brought into question.
I had dinner on Friday night with a friend who had just returned from New York. He was complaining that the Ralph Lauren t-shirts that he bought for $10 US cost $139 in Australia. For a t-shirt. Apart from the obvious question of brands and marketing that leads to a t-shirt being so fucking expensive, he couldn’t understand why everything was so cheap in America. I couldn’t say anything. He wants to move to Massachusetts where gay marriage may become legal. But while the US debates the issue of same-sex marriage and nice liberal ideas they actively suppress basic human rights (economically and militarily) around the “Third” world by giving tacit support to right-wing regimes. In the pursuit of cheap t-shirts (cheap labour and resources) the US (and every other developed nation) engages in economic imperialism. Suppressing the liberal-left in the “Third” world has encouraged the extreme-left and extreme-right to oppose Western influence.
Anyway. Now I’m reading Beautiful Lies (Quarterly Essay, Issue 9, 2003) and it’s really depressing. In the past few years, actually, for about ten, I have loathed the US foreign policy and the destruction of Australian culture. But I had never considered the Australian contribution to world misery. Regardless of the scale of our contribution we have supported the US in Vietnam (which in 1954 had ousted the colonial French and was by all rights a sovereign nation). We turned our back on the actions of Sukarno and Indonesia in East Timor because he was so fucking insane and supported by the CPI and China. We supported the US in Iraq, twice. I would not be surprised to find that our involvement in Pacific nations, especially Papua New Guinea, is also questionable.
The main thrust of the essay is environmental. But it is a discussion that encompasses immigration, our colonial history, our notion of ourselves as a people, and generally the lies that sustain our concept of self and our way of life. It isn’t so much a series of ideas but the understanding that each of these is interlinked and that we can’t understand or address one without the other. It is obvious in a sense. The difficulty is that the government and the way in which we have been taught to think and learn is compartmentalised.
Basically, there must be a wholesale shift in thought. The essay is Australian in scope though it would equally apply to other industrialised nations. Flannery argues that we must reduce our needs by 60% and by that I assume that he speaks of manufactured goods, water and the unsustainable consumption that we generally engage in each day.
The use of solar energy is a prime example. There are government subsidies that support the purchase of solar panels and not only can it be used in tandem with the grid but excess energy can be sold back to the power companies thus reducing the need for coal-burning electricity. While there is the maintenance of panels and batteries the solar option is generally low maintenance and pays for itself. Currently, research into storing the energy in a hydrogen form will mean doing away with batteries – reducing the number of heavy metals in the environment.
I’m not sure about my commitment. I generally don’t try to take a stance because I know that I will break it… plus living in an apartment, that I rent, in the city, makes it very difficult. But there is something essential in all of this.
I was studying the Australian poet Judith Wright this semester. She was a founder of the Australian Conservation Foundation. Her poetry is diverse but toward the end, she had come to a philosophical realisation that perhaps the reason for human existence was to wipe ourselves out. To destroy the planet. If the universe is itself (or at least the planets) subject to gradual decay then perhaps we fulfil some grand scheme. It was interesting that someone devoted to the land their whole life would come to this conclusion. She was deeply saddened and disillusioned.
My difficulty is that it is all connected. Literature and poetry, in particular, are important to me because they speak directly to my soul. Or to put it in less questionable terms, language, as used in good poetry, helps me to better understand myself. The problem is that I can no longer divorce the way I live from the nebulous idea of a soul. I can’t keep trashing my body, I can’t keep supporting (through silence) the abuse of people and I can’t contribute to the destruction of the environment.
If this seems utopic or evangelical it’s only because, from what I can tell at the moment, things are fucking dire. It isn’t just environmental. Look at the politicians – those steering the boat. To quote a favourite film: “This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportion.” “…dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!”
I don’t know what to do. What can an individual do? When was the last time any kind of social protest affected change? Gandhi? He was probably just representative of greater change – most likely a symbol perhaps a catalyst at best. How many people have to hit the streets before those that represent and speak for us decide not to send soldiers abroad? When you look at the numbers who marched against the latest war in Iraq and add to that the lazy bastards like me who supported them but didn’t join, there is a vast undercurrent of dissatisfaction – and it gets ignored. What the hell is going on?
The only thing that I can think of is writing. And I don’t think that polemics is suited to me.
In one of the most poignant parts of the essay Flannery also discusses the inherent conflict between environmental concerns and population policy. Flannery advocates a smaller Australian population. Around 8 million, less than half our present number. So how do we balance our environmental needs with humane immigration policy, with refugee situations that our nation in its support of the United States and other nations has contributed? How can we send troops to Vietnam and then find ourselves amazed at the flood of refugees?
I’m not sure whether there is an answer to this question.
