But it is said of old Cosmographers, that when they had said all that they knew of a Countrey, and yet much more was to be said, they said that the rest of those countries were possest with Giants, or Witches, or Spirits, or Wilde beasts, so that they could pierce no farther into that Countrey, so when wee have travell'd as farre as wee can, with safetie, that is , as farre as Ancient, or Moderne Expositores lead us, in the discoverie of these new Heavens, and new Earth, yet wee must say at last, that it is a Countrey inhabited with Angells, and Arch-angells, with Cherubins, and Seraphins, and that wee can looke no farther into it, with these eyes. Where it is locally, wee enquire not; We rest in this, that it is the habitation prepar'd for the blessed Saints of God; Heavens, where the Moone is more glorious that our Sunne, and the Sunne as glorious as Hee that made it; For it is he himselfe, the Sonne of God, the Sunne of glorie. A new Earth, where all their waters and milke, and all their milke, honey; where all their grasse is corne, and all their corne, Manna; where all their glebe, all their clods of earth are gold, and all their gold of innumerable carats; Where all their minutes are ages, and all their ages, Eternity; Where everything, is every minute, in the highest exaltation, as good as it can be, and yet super-exalted, and infinitely multiplied, by every minutes addition; every minute, infinitely better, than ever it was before. Of these new heavens, and this new earth we must say at last, that wee can say nothing; For, the eye of Man gath not seene, nor eare heard, nor heart conceiv'd, the State of this place. We limit, and determine our consideration with that Horizon, with which the Holy Ghost hath limited us, that it is that new Heavens, and new Earth, wherein dwelleth Righteousnesse.
John Donne - from The Sermons and Death's Duell
Perhaps modernity is no more or less than the attempt to say something or all of Donne's new Earth. To actualise the dream or make it contemporaneous, to make it real. Badiou characterises the 20th Century as having been driven by a 'passion for the real', this 'real' rather than acting as a break or dislocation on development (as something which can stand for conscience) is it's fuel, humility will always appear false. In the face of what cannot be conceived we push and probe, we cannot 'limit, and determine our consideration with that Horizon,'. Rather than being bound to atheism, modernity is driven or haunted by a disavowed religious spirit or consciousness, that can only inspire religiousity - the appearence of religion emptied of content.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
tradition
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. T.S Eliot - Tradition and the Individual Talent (1922)
The modern artist is a figure also, of self-sacrifice. The emptying of the personal, the common or ordinary, the choice of the 'unseen over what is seen', and the need to open up to forces beyond the range of the rational as conceived at the moment, are perhaps examples of how religious motivations, were relocated to and redistributed within novel forms of artistic practise. Tradition is as present within modernity, as in pre-modernity, only its role is reversed, rather than the repository of valuable forms and norms, a bosom, it is perceived at best as something that can no longer bear continued repetiton or reproduction (to continue to do so is cliche), in this sense it becomes at worst perceived as a kind of vice, that the artist must break out of completely.
It's a question whether 'tradition' ever implied a reproductive model, perhaps this is the view of tradition that modernity has had to end up with - now that we seem to be moving away from any dialectical engagment with tradition at all.
The modern artist is a figure also, of self-sacrifice. The emptying of the personal, the common or ordinary, the choice of the 'unseen over what is seen', and the need to open up to forces beyond the range of the rational as conceived at the moment, are perhaps examples of how religious motivations, were relocated to and redistributed within novel forms of artistic practise. Tradition is as present within modernity, as in pre-modernity, only its role is reversed, rather than the repository of valuable forms and norms, a bosom, it is perceived at best as something that can no longer bear continued repetiton or reproduction (to continue to do so is cliche), in this sense it becomes at worst perceived as a kind of vice, that the artist must break out of completely.
It's a question whether 'tradition' ever implied a reproductive model, perhaps this is the view of tradition that modernity has had to end up with - now that we seem to be moving away from any dialectical engagment with tradition at all.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
the repellent surface of some things
I don't know where it was but I read something recently about the design of McDonalds resturants/eateries whatever. Superficially attractive , bright lights and colours etc, open and accomodating, particular for kids, the design however has a cunningly built in time limit, after the time taken to eat your meal (I think they estimate that at somewhere between 5-10mins)they transform into alienating, uncomfortable, stark, purposeless shells: hardly a place you want to hang round in - which is the point of course, the next hungry belly needs a place to eat their burger. There's a terrific balancing act involved in pulling this off, rather than considering McDonald's architecture as merely bland, perhaps it has more in common with medieval torture devices, a carefully calibrated instrument designed with great ingenuity with a single purpose in mind - that is placing subjects into a situation poised between two aggravated states of being.
Rather than physical the discomfort is existential.
Surfaces needn't be alienating it's just some are designed with that purpose in mind. The commodity space of consumption is a depthless and literally repellent surface, over which the eye is made to continually flicker across. Again the imagery of torture comes to mind, the perpetual torments of the damned, the denial of a resting place or home. The persistent circulation around invisible circuits of frustrated desire. In this sense these circuits actually eclipse vision itself, it is almost as if we become caught up in a 'blind spot' a place of 'unvision', of 'illvisability', a kind of negative zen point, Zizek's idea of drive, of properly idiotic jouissance- "no light, rather, darkness visible".
Commodity spaces have moved far beyond the function of facilitating choice and comparison, they no longer aim to enchant either, that like a good magic trick requires a certain rhythm, the ability to pause, vary tension, like a bazaar, exist as a thing of ebb and flow. In keeping with our postmodern age, of the breakdown between forms and genre, whether the manifestation is spatial or televisual makes little difference. Trying to watch this January's Superbowl was literally tortuous. The show is now more advertising opportunity than sporting contest, and a majority of Americans watch it as such. The topic of next day conversation is more likely to be a particular multi-million dollar commercial, than any particular play. It is the embodiment of a kind of extreme attention deficit disorder, because we literally are not able to become absorbed by any particular moment, lest boredom is risked or marketing moment missed. It left me a little bored but mostly radically perplexed, the whole shindig should come with a warning attached "Not for Human Consumption".
On a loosely related topic I was reading about the opening of the new Wembley, which I must admit looks very exciting, how many dashed hopes has that building been constructed to withstand, I wonder, because I'm English. After all the extra millions spent(or is it billions), worrying about sinking foundations may be least of our worries what affect further failure on the national psyche? But it's interesting to see how the architects decided on a very restricted colour scheme, the idea being the supporters will bring the atmosphere and life to the stadium. I suppose the advertising hoardings will do that too, but all the same it is a real gesture to the soul of the game at what is still called 'The Home of Football'. The building is just a container, awaiting the immaterial energies of the players and fans.
Rather than physical the discomfort is existential.
Surfaces needn't be alienating it's just some are designed with that purpose in mind. The commodity space of consumption is a depthless and literally repellent surface, over which the eye is made to continually flicker across. Again the imagery of torture comes to mind, the perpetual torments of the damned, the denial of a resting place or home. The persistent circulation around invisible circuits of frustrated desire. In this sense these circuits actually eclipse vision itself, it is almost as if we become caught up in a 'blind spot' a place of 'unvision', of 'illvisability', a kind of negative zen point, Zizek's idea of drive, of properly idiotic jouissance- "no light, rather, darkness visible".
Commodity spaces have moved far beyond the function of facilitating choice and comparison, they no longer aim to enchant either, that like a good magic trick requires a certain rhythm, the ability to pause, vary tension, like a bazaar, exist as a thing of ebb and flow. In keeping with our postmodern age, of the breakdown between forms and genre, whether the manifestation is spatial or televisual makes little difference. Trying to watch this January's Superbowl was literally tortuous. The show is now more advertising opportunity than sporting contest, and a majority of Americans watch it as such. The topic of next day conversation is more likely to be a particular multi-million dollar commercial, than any particular play. It is the embodiment of a kind of extreme attention deficit disorder, because we literally are not able to become absorbed by any particular moment, lest boredom is risked or marketing moment missed. It left me a little bored but mostly radically perplexed, the whole shindig should come with a warning attached "Not for Human Consumption".
On a loosely related topic I was reading about the opening of the new Wembley, which I must admit looks very exciting, how many dashed hopes has that building been constructed to withstand, I wonder, because I'm English. After all the extra millions spent(or is it billions), worrying about sinking foundations may be least of our worries what affect further failure on the national psyche? But it's interesting to see how the architects decided on a very restricted colour scheme, the idea being the supporters will bring the atmosphere and life to the stadium. I suppose the advertising hoardings will do that too, but all the same it is a real gesture to the soul of the game at what is still called 'The Home of Football'. The building is just a container, awaiting the immaterial energies of the players and fans.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
velocity of the past
Then came film and burst this prison -world with the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and venturously go traveling.
- Walter Benjamin
What Benjamin would have said about the blogsphere, YouTube and the rest today, is as they say, pure conjecture. A tenth of a second is painfully slow and plodding by our standards, much as Benjamin would have marveled (as we still do) at the people in his childhood who thought the speed of the bicycle exhilarating and provocative . The quote captures Benjamin's complex (an overused word, misapplied much methinks) reactions to technology and experience. This progress is both deeply destructive, obliterating, but we cannot turn completely away from it, in fact its consequences are as deeply attracting as in some way they are replusive. The world destroyed was a prison, but its destruction leaves only 'far-flung ruins and debris'.
It makes me think about the ruins of bombed cities, where children played, in fact now I think about it, it reminds of what the painter Keifer said in a recent interview - for him to play in the empty shells of buildings was an literally an enchanting thing.
- Walter Benjamin
What Benjamin would have said about the blogsphere, YouTube and the rest today, is as they say, pure conjecture. A tenth of a second is painfully slow and plodding by our standards, much as Benjamin would have marveled (as we still do) at the people in his childhood who thought the speed of the bicycle exhilarating and provocative . The quote captures Benjamin's complex (an overused word, misapplied much methinks) reactions to technology and experience. This progress is both deeply destructive, obliterating, but we cannot turn completely away from it, in fact its consequences are as deeply attracting as in some way they are replusive. The world destroyed was a prison, but its destruction leaves only 'far-flung ruins and debris'.
It makes me think about the ruins of bombed cities, where children played, in fact now I think about it, it reminds of what the painter Keifer said in a recent interview - for him to play in the empty shells of buildings was an literally an enchanting thing.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
visit to the Barnes
I took time off from my presently soul-squashing job and drove down to the Barnes Foundation last Friday. The Barnes Foundation is at the moment caught up in controversy regarding a proposed relocation to a more central and modern venue. So as perhaps the chances of seeing this collection of Impressionism and other stuff are perhaps fewer, I really had to go. I lived in Rome for a few years and made the mistake of never going to all the churches and seeing all the art until I was about to leave, you take it all for granted. Likewise I think the Barnes deserved a visit now rather than later.
It's a pretty strange gallery by today's internationalist, global standards, paintings are often more than a dozen to a wall, objects from Egypt, China, and pre-Columbus America are displayed in cabinets under works by Matisse and Klee. There was in Barne's mind a reason for every arrangement, and the present 'crisis' centres on whether the displays can be disrupted. It is like giant curiosity cabinet, though when you go into the largest room, it is exhilirating. There is something light and optimistic in spite of the tattered faded cloth wall covers. Seeing paintings in real life, in real time, that are considered 'key' in some sense, is exciting, as a spectator about to stand in front of them, ownership is about to pass to you, if only for a short time,if you sort of like painting in the first place, that is. I know 'ownership' is a weighted word, not totally irrelevant but also over-determining, because this is a space that can convince you that there is room for places and experiences that do not in the end fundamentally rest of a notion of property - of ownership. This is part of the mystery of painting, objects that are in themselves pretty unremarkable, fragile, hesitant flat objects that can be easily damaged, flimsy things that become objects of ridicule when put up for sale and fetch huge amounts of money, but given a wall, a flat surface, an almost marginal place, how else do we think of the wall, can create a film, a surface, that is a place for something profound to happen, and continue to happen. A little bathetic perhaps but to hell with it.
Perhaps Barnes liked Renoir a little too much, but even those nudes are so physical, so material, how Impressionism and then Matisse were concerned with the density and weight, the consequence almost of the world. We think generally that this art is airy, light, ephemeral, superficial, but really, especially with Cezanne as the linchpin, it is the description and equivalence of a physical reality that is there at the centre of things. Even Matisse - nothing doodely, terrific density, which makes 'realist' art pretty pale in comparison, and even pendantic in some strange way, as if reality had to go cap in hand to the artist and ask for the close attention, and precision of more exact representation.
Very positivist, very un-Romantic, even a painting like 'Joie de Vivre' of pre-Lapsarian life, is basically robust and somehow 'consequential', though I don't know what I mean by this exactly, they register in the world, and are about this registering - like notches on a stick perhaps.
But I think this painting is great, although it was probably a couple of small works by Klee that I would have tried to smuggle out. Just the feeling of invention, of rule breaking and rule making - simultaneously occuring in the same moment, bending everything into relation with it, by that I mean a total perceptual world. Connections between making and perception that seem very distant to us now, rather like the ancient Greeks appeared to medieval artists, the sense that a world has been closed off to us and become inaccessible. Not that it is, rather I think today with some exceptions art-making is self-identitified as somehow autistic, paratactic processes predominate, deriving from ironically much of this art, but it is a partial understanding, perhaps a deliberate misunderstanding. Even Seurat the champion of divisionism, to say he is the 'father' of empty mechanism in contemporary art is a meaning we retroactively evoke. Impressionism can 'look' like the start of a reductive process, as something that had to lead to the next 'discovery' or breakthrough, although of course it didn't really, we have only imperfect and often contingent reponses by subsequent artists to what went before. I think to realise this is liberating.
It's a pretty strange gallery by today's internationalist, global standards, paintings are often more than a dozen to a wall, objects from Egypt, China, and pre-Columbus America are displayed in cabinets under works by Matisse and Klee. There was in Barne's mind a reason for every arrangement, and the present 'crisis' centres on whether the displays can be disrupted. It is like giant curiosity cabinet, though when you go into the largest room, it is exhilirating. There is something light and optimistic in spite of the tattered faded cloth wall covers. Seeing paintings in real life, in real time, that are considered 'key' in some sense, is exciting, as a spectator about to stand in front of them, ownership is about to pass to you, if only for a short time,if you sort of like painting in the first place, that is. I know 'ownership' is a weighted word, not totally irrelevant but also over-determining, because this is a space that can convince you that there is room for places and experiences that do not in the end fundamentally rest of a notion of property - of ownership. This is part of the mystery of painting, objects that are in themselves pretty unremarkable, fragile, hesitant flat objects that can be easily damaged, flimsy things that become objects of ridicule when put up for sale and fetch huge amounts of money, but given a wall, a flat surface, an almost marginal place, how else do we think of the wall, can create a film, a surface, that is a place for something profound to happen, and continue to happen. A little bathetic perhaps but to hell with it.
Perhaps Barnes liked Renoir a little too much, but even those nudes are so physical, so material, how Impressionism and then Matisse were concerned with the density and weight, the consequence almost of the world. We think generally that this art is airy, light, ephemeral, superficial, but really, especially with Cezanne as the linchpin, it is the description and equivalence of a physical reality that is there at the centre of things. Even Matisse - nothing doodely, terrific density, which makes 'realist' art pretty pale in comparison, and even pendantic in some strange way, as if reality had to go cap in hand to the artist and ask for the close attention, and precision of more exact representation.
Very positivist, very un-Romantic, even a painting like 'Joie de Vivre' of pre-Lapsarian life, is basically robust and somehow 'consequential', though I don't know what I mean by this exactly, they register in the world, and are about this registering - like notches on a stick perhaps.
But I think this painting is great, although it was probably a couple of small works by Klee that I would have tried to smuggle out. Just the feeling of invention, of rule breaking and rule making - simultaneously occuring in the same moment, bending everything into relation with it, by that I mean a total perceptual world. Connections between making and perception that seem very distant to us now, rather like the ancient Greeks appeared to medieval artists, the sense that a world has been closed off to us and become inaccessible. Not that it is, rather I think today with some exceptions art-making is self-identitified as somehow autistic, paratactic processes predominate, deriving from ironically much of this art, but it is a partial understanding, perhaps a deliberate misunderstanding. Even Seurat the champion of divisionism, to say he is the 'father' of empty mechanism in contemporary art is a meaning we retroactively evoke. Impressionism can 'look' like the start of a reductive process, as something that had to lead to the next 'discovery' or breakthrough, although of course it didn't really, we have only imperfect and often contingent reponses by subsequent artists to what went before. I think to realise this is liberating.
the perils of eating (only) your greens
from a NYT review by E.Rothstein of 'The Bloodless Revolution' by Tristram Stuart - Sunday Feb 25th 2007
This is vegatarianism's lure and vegatarianism's trap. Along with its heightened awareness of the value of life, it brings a heightened desire to bring a new world into existence. And the greater the ambition, the higher the cost; the greater the purity, the stronger the purge. Many Nazis, as Stuart asserts, ''were either vegetarian or interested in related issues" because they, like the Stalinists of the same period, believed they were ushering in a new age, answering to a higher law. But in this quest for lost paradise and in the name of superior virtue and high moral feeling, how many doses of deadly mercury have been fervently administered? It's enough to make one take up meat?
It's just amusing in a provocative way that the humble cause of eating exclusively greens, because let's face it we are under little threat from vegitarians, might also be indicative of forces whose other expressions are far from the mundane and innocent.
We micro-manage perhaps as a defense mechanism of some sort, those seemingly harmless attachments to certain habits perhaps contain treacheries, that on at a larger scale, become potentially authoritarian. Foucault and Deleuze sometimes talked of 'micro-fascism', the building blocks that enable larger misuses. What are the progressions that this takes - from minor to major? From the minor and quite often positive to the larger, major and more unwieldly, and therefore potentially dangerous abuses.
This is vegatarianism's lure and vegatarianism's trap. Along with its heightened awareness of the value of life, it brings a heightened desire to bring a new world into existence. And the greater the ambition, the higher the cost; the greater the purity, the stronger the purge. Many Nazis, as Stuart asserts, ''were either vegetarian or interested in related issues" because they, like the Stalinists of the same period, believed they were ushering in a new age, answering to a higher law. But in this quest for lost paradise and in the name of superior virtue and high moral feeling, how many doses of deadly mercury have been fervently administered? It's enough to make one take up meat?
It's just amusing in a provocative way that the humble cause of eating exclusively greens, because let's face it we are under little threat from vegitarians, might also be indicative of forces whose other expressions are far from the mundane and innocent.
We micro-manage perhaps as a defense mechanism of some sort, those seemingly harmless attachments to certain habits perhaps contain treacheries, that on at a larger scale, become potentially authoritarian. Foucault and Deleuze sometimes talked of 'micro-fascism', the building blocks that enable larger misuses. What are the progressions that this takes - from minor to major? From the minor and quite often positive to the larger, major and more unwieldly, and therefore potentially dangerous abuses.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
family history
A Family History Like Too Many Others - Daniel Mendelsohn, Op-Ed (Feb 18th NYTimes)
As with any genre, such letters had their characteristic tropes. There's the uneasy opening, hovering between an emphasis on the writers desperate situation and an awkward acknowledgement that his relationship to the addressee is perhaps not of recent vintage. To an old college friend Otto Frank wrote, " I would not ask if conditons here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse.....Perhaps you remember that we have two girls." A similiar agonizing tension colors the letters on my great-uncle, Samuel Jager. "You'll be wondering...why I'm writing to you after so many years," one of then begins, although he soon gives reason in this and many other letters: "From reading the papers you know a little about what the Jews are going through here, but what you know is just one-hundredth of it."
As with any genre, such letters had their characteristic tropes. There's the uneasy opening, hovering between an emphasis on the writers desperate situation and an awkward acknowledgement that his relationship to the addressee is perhaps not of recent vintage. To an old college friend Otto Frank wrote, " I would not ask if conditons here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse.....Perhaps you remember that we have two girls." A similiar agonizing tension colors the letters on my great-uncle, Samuel Jager. "You'll be wondering...why I'm writing to you after so many years," one of then begins, although he soon gives reason in this and many other letters: "From reading the papers you know a little about what the Jews are going through here, but what you know is just one-hundredth of it."
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