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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Schwarz has posted an excellent collection of quotes on "utopian plagiarism."
Teaser: "Not a machine, not nostalgia for vinyl, and most certainly not a happy digital camper, data trash is the critical (telematic) mind of the twenty-first century. Data trash loves living at that violent edge where total human body scanning meets an inner mind that says no, and means it."
Nostalgia for analog video from the days before homemade images were infinitely malleable, cultural obsession with the empty trappings of stardom, a vague feeling of loss in art criticism for the judgements of an authoritative voice, the slippery nature of elegant theoretical abstraction, all these themes have cropped up recently on this blog, and will continue to do so. Here's some more, a quote from a really good piece by John Bentley Mays on Ydessa Hendeles' big show "Partners," published in Canadian Art last summer. The whole article is online here.
The era during which the work in this show was largely conceived, made and collected—the last quarter of the 20th century—witnessed the rise to great popularity among curators and collectors of an art of gadgetry and mechanical technique, with a philosophical vocabulary (borrowed from the social sciences) to complement it. The issues raised by this art of camera, videocam, computerized printing, digital image manipulation and so on were peculiar to a culture of machines: reproducibility, copy and copyright, authenticity, originality, the ontological status of the ready-made, or this or that mechanical replica. Moral questions, the discussion of ethical imperatives, were as deeply unfashionable among opinion-makers in the art world as in the world at large, where relativism and skepticism, the values of the social sciences, prevailed. (The last notable, credible moral art-world thunderings were pronounced some 20 years ago, by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, when he laid a curse on the new European painting for its presumed crypto-fascism.)
I am not suggesting things in the period 1975-1999 could have been otherwise. Many in the generation that came of age in the 1960s, my generation, were left exhausted, by the mid-1970s, by the excess, hedonism and shallow idealism of the counterculture—by its extravagant proposals for liberation.
But without the connection to the world provided by moral discourse, the inner world of the 1970s became purely psychological, imaginary, obsessed by the fluid dynamics of sex and power. Ideas—real ideas, I mean, carrying moral conviction and leading to principled courses of action—carried less and less weight. The mental landscape of "Partners" inevitably reflects this desolate world of the late 20th century, its psychic homeland—the era's narrowed vision and emotional range, its diminished ambitions and withdrawn hopes.
On Thurday I'm gonna be on a panel moderated by Hal Niedzviecki, a man who's work I deeply respect, editor of the zine of zines, Broken Pencil. The topic of the panel is Hal's new book called Hello I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity. The book is about pop culture selling us on the idea that we should all be rock stars and seeding us with a deep craving and feeling of entitlement for our own celebrity status. But of course we're not all gonna be celebrities, and pop culture makes sure of that fact by keeping a monopolistic grip on the means of production of mainstream media. This creates disappointment and feelings of failure. Worse, rebellion is rendered meaningless, as rebelliousness itself is now a commodified style. The book raised some thoughts/responses for me:
- Celebrity is only a commodity when it is pursrued as an end in and of itself. Yes being cute and fuckable counts for too much in this world, but in fact, most forms of public recognition are actually the side effects of doing noteworthy work.
- Celebrity is a red-herring, a stand-in for meaning. Once we are fed, clothed and sheltered, looking for meaningful work is a top priority motivator. Recognition is a sign from the external world that we are doing something of value, but its the value we need, more than the accolades.
- Rebellion as a lifestyle choice deserves to be commodified! If you aren't bothered by anything in particular, why rebel? And if you are actually resisting something, who cares what you are wearing?
- Remember when Bank of Montreal bought "The Time's They Are A Changing" and tried to sell us financial services with ads of people holding up handwritten signs?...Remember when Billy Bragg reclaimed the song at a rally in Toronto during Days of Protest, belting it out over a tearful crowd who raised their voices with pride to sing along?...Anyone who's old enough to have been through their own pop sell-out dissillusion-and-reclamation experience, in short any who's lived through the past few decades of rising corporate culture...these people know that mass media will sell you your own soul, if you let it.
My kitty drawing is posted over on Tino's photo blog, Bike Lane Diary. The cat's in good company with lots of photos of intrepid winter cyclists.
quote from "Video's Body, Analog and Digital" by Laura U. Marks:
Among digital videomakers, one of the manifestations of the desire for indexicality is what I call analog nostalgia, a restrospective fondness for the "problems" of decay and generational loss that analog video posed. In the high-fidelity medium of digital video, artists are importing images of electronic dropout and decay, "TV snow" and the random colors of unrecorded tape, in a sort of longing for analog physicality. Analog nostalgia seems especially prevalent among works by students who started learning video production when it was fully digital.
[...]
While analog video suffers from bodily decay as the tape demagnetizes, digital video decays through "bit-rot", William Gibson’s evocative term for information loss that renders images in increasingly large and "forgetful" pixels. Crime TV shows us digital forgetting to blur faces into pixels. Artworks use it to metaphorize memory and information loss. In Déconstruction by Rémi Lacoste (1997), a shot of a building being demolished is rendered virtual by digital editing: the building reassembles, deconstructs again, and then deconstructs more terribly due to image compression, a kind of digital Alzheimer’s where the image is saved as just a few bytes of memory. Anthony Discenza’s The Vision Engine (1999), Phosphorescence (1999), and other works exploit the ability of pixelization to render the familiar strange. Phosphorescence begins with Rothkoesque images, gorgeous scumbled forms in deep red, lemon yellow, and blue-gray. Stripped of the digital algorithm that transformed them, the source images turn out to be just evening news broadcasts. Plundered images are manipulated so as to give us the immediacy of pre-symbolic perception that an Eric Siegel 1968 electronically synthesized video did [7].
