Peter Rudd
Scientism / athiesm / homo economicus is the unassailable three person godhead of our time. Even if things in general are going very badly, and the scientists, atheist and MBA/ economists have all of the power and are making all of the decisions, we still can’t and won’t blame the godhead. Tyson, Nye, Dawkins, Maher, Greenspan are the robed flunkies who design and administer the sacraments in the temple of techno materialist positivism. We follow in lock step.
It is breathtaking that STEM – science, technology engineering and mathematics – our education policy du jour, leaves out the humanities, the very antecedent of freedom. The fundamentalisms of markets, analysis, reason and tech, have replaced and erased history and the arts.
In the seventeenth century we suffocated under the yoke of religion and yearned for reason; today our god is technology and we pine for mystery.
It is hard now to recreate a sense of the almost complete impossibility of not being a religious believer in seventeenth-century England. But as I enter the Apple Store, symmetrically laid out with its central entrance door and an attractively illuminated high table at the far end, a parallel comes to mind. Digital technology seems to fill a large part of the mental space we reserve for faith. (Art, which is often put up as a candidate, is the opium only of a minority.) We depend on technology for the smooth running of our daily lives, if not for our salvation. We make obeisance to it, we feel obliged to buy into the whole package, rather than selecting and rejecting individual technologies. There is the familiar choice between minutely differentiated sects (Apple or Microsoft), but all must share the same basic creed. Upgrades are like revisions of dogma in which we have no say, but which we are bound to go along with anyway. To reject the technological is to declare oneself a heretic, a position as inconceivable now as declaring oneself an atheist in the 1600s.
Richard Dawkins’ moralizing atheism: Science, self-righteousness and militant belief — and disbelief
I agree with Dawkins more often than I do with the church. So why do I find Dawkins the more annoying?
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Filed under: brave new world, the sweet life | Tags: art, artists, economy, GARY GUTTING, humanities, living, the Stone
There are three kinds of people in a world set up for only two kinds: money people, service people and artistic people in a money and service world. No provisions are made nor needs required for the artistic in this world so if you’re artistic you are in a real limbo. But mere work and mere survival shouldn’t be enough; meaning counts a lot and artists contribute meaning. The choice is ours, to get by or to thrive.
From an article by Garry Gutting:
This talk of “a subject they love” brings us to the real crisis, which is both economic and cultural (or even moral). The point of work should not be just to provide the material goods we need to survive. Since work typically takes the largest part of our time, it should also be an important part of what gives our life meaning. Our economic system works well for those who find meaning in economic competition and the material rewards it brings. To a lesser but still significant extent, our system provides meaningful work in service professions (like health and social work) for those fulfilled by helping people in great need. But for those with humanistic and artistic life interests, our economic system has almost nothing to offer.
The Real Humanities Crisis, By GARY GUTTING
Filed under: brave new world, unseen world | Tags: art, art school, galleries, Jed Perl, Laissez-Faire Aesthetics, Magicians and Charlatans, museums
H. and I went to the MOMA several months ago. It feels like a mall, he cautioned, a cynical assessment that turned out to be true. I don’t like malls, and I didn’t like the experience of the MOMA that day. I found myself wanting to maximize the experience, judge the work, mark my progress as I walked through the galleries from the top floor down. It was an exercise in analysis rather than an experience in the realm of the senses.
What is a gallery for, we could ask. A repository of things deemed great with hours during which people may go to admire and inspect them? Or a sanctuary in which people confront and are transformed by the minds and work of great artists?
In his essay Laissez faire Aesthetics Jed Perl makes a case that our museums and galleries – and the art in them – are repositories, not sanctuaries. He describes our art as undisciplined, unimaginative, lacking conviction, contextless, questioning, incomplete, a spectacle, uncertain, disappointing and confusing. All this comes, he says, from laissez faire: the belief that if you leave it alone it will turn out better.
So perhaps we could turn our repository galleries into sanctuaries by putting a nail in the laissez-faire coffin.
Here is Perl:
Drop into the galleries for an afternoon and you will probably find yourself amused. I do. But when I go back to the galleries week after week and month after month, I find that my impressions become increasingly unstable. I feel uneasy. And I know that I am not alone. Although gallery goers are stirred by contemporary art and museumgoers are having extraordinary experiences, there is a widespread feeling that nothing really adds up—either for the artists or for the audience. No matter how eye-filling the encounters that people are having with works of art, these experiences can end up somehow unsatisfactory, stripped of context and implication. For inveterate gallerygoers the art world has come to resemble a puzzle to which nobody really has any solution. And why is there no solution? There is no solution because too many of the pieces are missing. The shared assumptions about the nature of art that ought to bind together our variegated experiences are nowhere to be found. Look behind the art world’s glittering collage of a façade and you find a pervasive uncertainty, a culture adrift in sour disenchantment. There is so much disappointment and confusion around the very idea of art that even when the art does not disappoint, people find themselves backing away from the experiences they have.
[…]
What laissez-faire aesthetics has left us with—in the museums, the galleries, the art schools, and the art magazines—is a weakening of conviction, an unwillingness to ever take a stand, a refusal to champion, or even surrender to, any first principle. More than anything else, what laissez-faire aesthetics threatens, with its insistence that anything goes, is the disciplined imagination without which an artist is rudderless, a wanderer in the wilderness.
Laissez-Faire Aesthetics, Jed Perl, Magicians and Charlatans
Filed under: departure lounge, the sweet life, unseen world | Tags: Alice in Wonderland, art, Salvadore Dali, surrealism
Filed under: brave new world | Tags: art, death, film, Ingmar Bergman, propaganda, religion, the seventh seal
Here is a bit of dialogue from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal in which Jons, the Knight’s squire asks a fresco painter in a church about his painting of death and the plague.
The Seventh Seal is about a Knight who is returning to his castle after spending time fighting in the Crusades. He is devout, preoccupied, a believer. His squire Jons is a much better source if you like your information straight up, as we see in this scene.
The Painter knows who butters his bread and is the conduit for a culture of fear used by a priesthood to control their people. Of course, he won’t admit it, but the insightful Squire has no problem labeling the art as propaganda.
JONS: What is this supposed to represent?
PAINTER: The Dance of Death.
JONS: And that one is Death?
PAINTER: Yes, he dances off with all of them.
JONS: Why do you paint such nonsense?
PAINTER: I thought it would serve to remind people that they must die.
JONS: Well, it’s not going to make them feel any happier.
PAINTER: Why should one always make people happy? It might not be a bad idea to scare them a little once in a while.
JONS: Then they’ll close their eyes and refuse to look at your painting.
PAINTER: Oh, they’ll look. A skull is almost more interesting than a naked woman.
JONS: If you do scare them …
PAINTER: They’ll think.
JONS: And if they think …
PAINTER: They’ll become still more scared.
JONS: And then they’ll run right into the arms of the priests.
PAINTER: That’s not my business.
Filed under: brave new world | Tags: art, banking, fort, lordy rodriquez, manhattan, new museum, wall street
This is map made by the artist Lordy Rodriguez for the Get Lost show at the New Museum on the Bowery. There is a description of the intent of the show below. Have a look at the other maps here.
Rodriguez’s map shows Manhattan at some future date. It is a clear and perhaps alarming view of a very different time. The island, Central Park, the Hudson and East Rivers, Broadway, the world trade center and Brooklyn are all recognizable elements that tell us we are in Manhattan. However there are changes which mark drift from the ideas and forms that make up the New York we know today. Continue reading
Filed under: the sweet life | Tags: art, artist, capitalism, competition, Duchamps, East, gallery, laziness, Malevich, museum, production, socialism, West
(Balthus, Vee Speers, James Lavadour, Roger Ballen)
Stilinovic is an artist from Croatia. For him, thought, amnesia, indifference, non-activity, pain, stupidity and futility are virtues. We must practice these things and perfect them. Or we will end up as mere producers, promoters and competitors.
As an artist, I learned from both East (socialism) and West (capitalism). Of course, now when the borders and political systems have changed, such an experience will be no longer possible. But what I have learned from that dialogue, stays with me. My observation and knowledge of Western art has lately led me to a conclusion that art cannot exist … any more in the West. This is not to say that there isn’t any. Why cannot art exist any more in the West? The answer is simple. Artists in the West are not lazy. Artists from the East are lazy; whether they will stay lazy now when they are no longer Eastern artists, remains to be seen.
Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, dumb time – total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, futile concentration. Those virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected. Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists but rather producers of something… Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is first), their preoccupation with objects, all that drives them away from laziness, from art. Just as money is paper, so a gallery is a room.
Artists from the East were lazy and poor because the entire system of insignificant factors did not exist. Therefore they had time enough to concentrate on art and laziness. Even when they did produce art, they knew it was in vain, it was nothing.
Artists from the West could learn about laziness, but they didn’t. Two major 20th century artists treated the question of laziness, in both practical and theoretical terms: Duchamp and Malevich. Duchamp never really discussed laziness, but rather indifference and non-work. When asked by Pierre Cabanne what had brought him most pleasure in life, Duchamp said: “First, having been lucky. Because basically I’ve never worked for a living. I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view. I hope that some day we’ll be able to live without being obliged to work. Thanks to my luck, I was able to manage without getting wet”.
Malevich wrote a text entitled “Laziness – the real truth of mankind” (1921). In it he criticized capitalism because it enabled only a small number of capitalists to be lazy, but also socialism because the entire movement was based on work instead of laziness. To quote: “People are scared of laziness and persecute those who accept it, and it always happens because no one realizes laziness is the truth; it has been branded as the mother of all vices, but it is in fact the mother of life. Socialism brings liberation in the unconscious, it scorns laziness without realizing it was laziness that gave birth to it; in his folly, the son scorns his mother as a mother of all vices and would not remove the brand; in this brief note I want to remove the brand of shame from laziness and to pronounce it not the mother of all vices, but the mother of perfection”. Finally, to be lazy and conclude: there is no art without laziness.
Work is a desease – Karl Marx.
Work is a shame – Vlado Martek.
–The Praise of Laziness, Mladen Stilinovic
Filed under: unseen world | Tags: art, criticism, Francis Bacon, life, painting, violence
Francis Bacon made difficult paintings, and beautiful. They shake to the core because he is talking about the unearthed. This is about his method. The painting is the medium by which the artist returns the onlooker to life, violently. So we are dead until the image resuscitates us.
In the way I work I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do. Is that an accident? Perhaps one could say it’s not an accident, because it becomes a selective process which part of this accident one chooses to preserve. One is attempting, of course, to keep the vitality of the accident and yet preserve a continuity … What has never yet been analyzed is why this particular way of painting is more poignant than illustration. I suppose because it has a life completely of its own. It lives on its own, like the image one’s trying to trap; it lives on its own, and therefore transfers the essence of the image more poignantly. So that the artist may be able to open up or rather, should I say, unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently … There is a possibility that you get through this accidental thing something much more profound than what you really wanted.”
~The Brutality of Fact, Bacon interview with David Sylvester
Eithne Jordan
Peripheral Landscapes
“The images have a curious half-remembered or imagined quality which has an unsettling but very satisfying effect, like empty stage sets or movie stills poised and prepared for human activity or abandoned and discarded after use. This is a measure of the extent to which the subjects are merely a formal device for the artist to explore form, composition and perspective. The industrial zones and urban environments, melancholy spaces inhabited only by objects or machines, arise directly out of the Still Life paintings. They are, in one sense, giant still lives depicting monumental shapes in the landscape. In another sense they do audit the aesthetic of the world we inhabit, the motorways, garages and warehouses that serve our needs and become a passive part of our visual consciousness.”
~Galway Arts Centre, galwayartscentre.ie
Filed under: the sweet life | Tags: art, chekhov, dissatisfaction, everyday, life, ordinary, questioning, skepticism, world, writing
(Kureishi | Tolstoy | Chekhov)
Hanif Kureishi is the writer of The Buddha of Suburbia. In this quotation, he says that we use art to raise the events of our lives out of the realm of insignificance.
He asserts that writing is an opening up, an unraveling, a continual search. The conclusive and finite, and systems we have blindly come to accept like political thought, are limiting – like flattening out a round earth. So, life is made sweet and human and dimensional by perpetual asking and questioning and yearning.
The master Chekhov taught that it is in the ordinary, the everyday, the unremarkable – and in the usually unremarked – that the deepest, most extraordinary and affecting events occur. These observations of the ordinary are bound up with everyone else’s experience the universal – and with what it is to be a child, parent, husband, lover. Most of the significant moments of one’s life are ‘insignificant’ to other people. It is showing how and why they are significant and also why they may seem absurd, that is art.
The aged Tolstoy thought he had to solve all the problems of life, Chekhov saw that these problems could only be put, not answered, at least by the part of yourself that was an artist. Perhaps as a man you could be effective in the world; and Chekhov was. As a writer, though, skepticism was preferable to a didacticism or advocacy that seemed to settle everything but which, in reality, closed everything off. Political or spiritual solutions rendered the world less interesting. Rather than reminding you of its baffling strangeness, they flattened it out.
In the end there is only one subject for an artist, What is the nature of human experience? What is it to be alive, suffer and feel? What is it to love or need another person? To what extent can we know anyone else? Or ourselves? In other words, what it is to be a human being. These are questions that can never be answered satisfactorily but they have to be put again and again by each generation and by each person. The writer trades in dissatisfaction.
~excerpted from Something Given: Reflections on Writing, by Hanif Kureishi
