Epic of sorts

In recent days I have been engaged in discussions regarding the culture of founding myths. The idea behind such a myth has for the most part inspired great nationalism. The most dominant example we’ve discussed is that of the Aeneid by Virgil. Shortly after Rome becomes an Empire, one which has decimated Carthage and enslaved Greece, the Aeneid is produced as proof of the godly heritage from which the Empire has formed. When looking at it through this national lens we can start to make sense of the treatment of Dido, the founder of Carthage, who from the Roman vantage point must be defeated by Aeneas, after all Rome defeats Carthage thrice.

We except these myths as art today and yes many do look at the nationalistic aspects of such epics, but what interests me more is to find the examples today of such writing. One obvious example is that of Fawzi Mellah’s Elissa (Dido) which romanticizes the founding of Carthage for a post-colonial Tunisia.

In both cases Elissa and the Aeneid the intent is to create a national epic. But one approaches the story from an imperialistic point of view (that is Rome who has defeated/conquered/ and ultimately destroyed Carthage) and the other is from a truly national, post imperialism point of view (that is Tunisia redefining its founding myth). Said had it right when he described how nationalism follows imperialism and perhaps Elissa is the best example of that relationship.

But enough of the other side of the Atlantic.  Sure we have our revolution but where are our founding myth. Why try and stay close to the facts? why not expand the Revolution into some large blown up lie that can unite us around what America once meant? Well I don’t mean to get political but the divisions today are just absurd and I’m starting to believe that our salvation is not in debate or politics or journalism but in art, in literature and in the founding of a national epic that can bring America behind what we were founded for.

-Huysmans

Found Art Found Everywhere

The prime piece of remix fodder for this week happens to be “Pretty Much Everywhere, It’s Gonna Be Hot.”

This one is a bizarre 9-second interchange on a news show, possibly Haitian, though they speak English. It sets off my stupidity detector, sure, but it also sets off involuntary laughter. It may work for you, it may not, but what I want to ask is, can we call things like this art? Is the process of selecting, or at least stumbling upon, a strange old video that happens to have some peculiar entertainment value, and doing just a bit of cutting too easy? Or is the end product the only thing that matters?

I don’t think many people would argue that, for instance, The Atomic Cafe, a film constructed entirely out of old footage and audio recordings from the early Cold War, is not art. It has a clear identity of its own, a narrative arc, even though the only work the creators did involved selection, cutting, and sequencing of the source material. The same could be said of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which I have been listening to a lot lately – Smith not only took the trouble of amassing old records and picking out the best, but he sequenced them so that they commented on each other and formed a vaguely historical arc. Perhaps not everyone would agree that the Anthology should be called a work of art, but that view is not uncommon.

If we’re going to argue that these examples are instances of art, while a single found video is not, then we will have to come up with a clear place to draw the line. It is hard to argue that one piece of art has a vision while another does not – how do we know what was in the creator’s head? – and it is also hard to argue that a single piece of footage does not reflect on the world around us. What, then, is the difference?

Thoughts?

~therighthandofnixon

Is THAT art?!?!?! I mean a child could have done that?

This post was originally published for Literature’s Next Frontier and appeared there on February 20th, 2008.

I have much to say and engage with in regards to these two questions and I do not plan on writing it all down now, or even get close to addressing all the problems with these two questions but I wanted the conversation to start. So I have been doing some Saussure reading lately, for a class mind you, I don’t think I could do it for myself yet in life, and well more specifically I have been reading his Lecture Notes from the University of Geneva, 1906-11, compiled and published by his students after his death. Okay that all being said the part of these notes I want to draw attention to is the three ways in which a word, a linguistic sign, is arbitrary. The three ways come from first breaking up the sign into its two parts, signifier (the sound) and signified (the idea or concept). For example when we say “chair” the sound associated with the concept of a device for sitting on are not inherently combined, that’s easy enough to understand when one travels to a place where one’s native language is not practiced. Try saying chair somewhere where they don’t speak English and see if they understand you. So with these two aspects defined what is then arbitrary? Well as is suggested above the relationship between the signified and the signifier is completely conventional, why call a chair a chair and not a table? It is just what we have chosen. Second the sound itself is arbitrarily defined, why not chairy or chaaaair? Lastly the concept is also arbitrarily defined. A stool and chair are separate in our language, not all languages and a desk chair and table chair both use the word chair, in other languages they don’t have the same signifier.

We can spend all day talking about Saussure but the only thing important for the art question is the arbitrariness of language. given that I want to know bring up C. S. Pierce who studied sign. Pierce, 1839-1914, defined three different signs: Icons, resembles what it points to, Index, related to its object through forceful interaction, and Symbols, anything that requires information to form the connection. Language as it is arbitrary and conventional falls under that third category. Renaissance paintings fall under the first category and photograph falls under the first two, as it is both representational of what it points to and it is a consequence of it (that’s why photos can be evidence and paintings can’t, for the most part).

Okay NOW back to the question at hand, what is meant when someone says “a child could have done that?” that’s what I am now going to address:

So last weekend I was at our university’s annual sculpture show and had a wonderful and exploratory time observing and being part of the exhibitions. But of course, with the art being student created (ie experimental) there came a slew of questions or rather comments regarding the validity of the art. For example when looking at one of the more hidden pieces that was made up of plaster, grocery bags, hot glue, wax, and a globe it was stated that the piece was not for sale. The response of one individual to that knowledge was “why would someone even be interested in that? they could get it at a supermarket for far less, hell it comes with your order at a supermarket” he was obviously referring to the enormous number of plastic bags used int he sculpture’s creation. So therefore the question becomes creatability? I guess you could say, or rather that he and many others were measuring the “artistic merit” of the works based on how “easy” or “accessible” they were to create. Here is where I bring up Saussure, to remind us that our “conventions” for what is easy and hard, and what is beautiful and ugly, and especially what is and isn’t art is NOT based on any fundamental truth, for there isn’t one, but rather it is based on our own arbitrary definitions. One may be able to easily translate beauty linguistically between English and French but you’d be surprised at how the term may be applied very differently in the two cultures. I bring this up to suggest that when we talk about certain elements that “should” be striven for in art, those elements have no universality in them and furthermore are completely relative based on what we define them as not.

Okay then so let’s briefly talk about what is implied with that child statement. First let me say that I am not going to take the time here to debate it but rather just understand it, later we’ll debate it. So typically the “a child could do that” statement applies to the works of art that appear to have no talent applied during the creative process. One that I always think of in this argument is Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square or Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. In either case the artistic object is not something that requires a mastery of representational ability. By that I mean to suggest that when this statement is applied to either work the implied meaning of it is that neither work achieved the same level of representational, iconic, achievement that say the Mona Lisa did. So in the end I bring this up now to ask, do you think that what is implied by this statement is a comparison with Renaissance art? After all nothing can be defined independently, everything is always negatively defined. Therefore for this to be slated with being less than art, what other artistic objects are being conjured up to mark this objects failure? Furthermore I want to bring up the question of “talent” and to suggest that we are applying to this word an age old convention of something physical. That the talent required to be a superior artist is some sort of mastery over representational, some kind of ability to recreate life through a medium. I would argue that it requires the SAME amount if not MORE talent to produce something so iconistic as to go against convention. Why seek only to use convention when defining art?

But I must also add that by bringing up Saussure we are going down a path of arbitrariness that may conclude with that unnerving realization that art itself is arbitrary.

Let the discussion begin,

Huysmans

A quick note on blogging as it relates to the Comparative Blogging Foundation

Part of my focus as this Foundation develops will be to explore the blog as a medium of art. I have just successfully finished a thesis looking at critical approaches to the blog as a new medium. By new medium I mean to suggest that the blog is not a new form of literature and text but rather it represents a whole new form of art, something entirely separate. Thus once the final version is ready I will begin putting it up here to engage those interested in how the medium of the blog will interact with the world of art.

The basic idea is that the blog is, as is the internet at large, a multimodal communicative art form that can engage the creators and observers in a completely new way, one that makes them lose the uniqueness of their role in this equation, that as the creator or as the observer. But it may do much more than that; it can also connect all forms of art easily and fluidly. However, without any form of an authoritative principle to define this critically, it is hard to filter the genius from the everyday. But perhaps that requirement itself is outdated.

All of this will be engaged and explored. That is one of the tasks the Comparative Blogging Foundation will seek to investigate: Where is the art in this world?

-Huysmans

Ambiguity (1)

Art that makes things easy can be easily ignored. It’s only when things are unclear that art can demand attention.

Granted, this only works when the reader (for the sake of simplicity let’s assume we’re talking about literature) either really loves or really hates what they’re reading. If they love it, then naturally they’ll want to defend it, and if there’s some nagging ideological point that’s not quite clear, they’ll want to come up with an interpretation that lands the novel on their side so they can enjoy it guilt-free. And if they hate it, then maybe they’ll want to back that hate up with an argument that it’s offensive not just to the aesthetic sense but to the moral. In either case, we’ve got them thinking critically, and that’s better for everyone than the readers just putting the piece down and forgetting about it. That’s my case for ambiguity, and that’s the sense in which I think art should be provocative – transgression must be subtle and to some degree up to the reader. Being blatantly and unilaterally offensive accomplishes nothing. And of course, it has to be fun to read and readable too, or else no one would read it through to the end who isn’t already beyond help.

~therighthandofnixon

Ends in Tragedy

In “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom,’” Umberto Eco discusses three broad genres of literature: tragedy, comedy, and humor. The distinction he makes between comedy and humor is a topic for another post, but I want to comment on what he says about tragedy: that because it embodies society’s standards, it always supports those standards. I think that, rather, tragedies tend to be equivocal about society.

In a tragedy, as Eco describes it, a character meets with misfortune because he or she breaks the rules of society. Such a story is conservative, he claims, because its resolution is reached when the rules reassert themselves in the character’s punishment, which would imply that there is something wrong with the character’s transgression. The story, simply put, warns the reader against doing something similar to what the character has done.

I don’t see this warning as inherent to the form. Eco uses the example of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which, he writes, “Madame Bovary is first of all a long and passionate argument against adultery, or, at least, about the impossibility of adultery in nineteenth-century bourgeois society.” If it is the latter, then why couldn’t the novel be read as criticizing a society that created a woman who is unable to conform to the rules it imposes on her? That is not the only reading, but I think a reading like it is possible for almost any tragedy.

It is rather, I think, stories with happy endings that unilaterally uphold laws. The (fairly bad but extremely successful) Victorian novel Lady Audley’s Secret, which has an eminently happy ending for every single character except the transgressor, Lady Audley, whose sad fate no one regrets, serves as a good example – in that novel, it is clear that we are meant to be happy at the end, and we cannot sympathize with Lady Audley if we want to do that. The normative claim is clear: the return to order that occurs when Lady Audley is punished for her misdeeds is a good thing, and thus that order is good.

At the end of tragedy, on the other hand, we are left wondering who is to blame. It is not often obvious; the ending of a tragedy usually has a sense of inevitability to it which precludes simple judgments. Is the tragedy of Madame Bovary Emma’s fault for her moral weakness? Her husband’s for his failure to recognize her unhappiness? Society’s for failing to create a place for her? Society’s for creating her? Or is it merely an accident of circumstances that leads to her fall? Ambiguities like this lie at the end of every tragedy. It is only the story with the happy ending, which requires a specific reaction from the reader in order to be appreciated, that makes unilateral decrees.

~therighthandofnixon

The Quixote by Pierre Menard

I have to agree with Jorge Luis Borges who so eloquently defended Menard’s Quixote. As Borges rights himself, “Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer” (Borges 1938). As I just mentioned in introducing this wonderfully unique Quixote, there is something far more incredible about the text written in the 20th century. After all it would almost appear as if literature was demanding such a text at the time of Cervantes where as today that demand seems to have shifted. That shift has made it that much more impressive for one such as Menard to go against the grain in producing this unbelievably unique work of art.

This can be viewed more visually with the work of one Marcel Duchamp who took it upon himself to create Fountain 1917 in 1964. This example of sculptural genius proved far more ambiguous for its time than the original of 1917. An even better example of the same author is his famous LHOOQ. Which portrayed in much more eloquence the Mona Lisa than has ever been seen before.

 

It just goes to show that art is not concrete; at best it is transitory and unstable.

 

The Comparative Blogging Foundation has arisen to defend the instability and preserve chaos.

 

-Huysmans

On the status of revivals appearing in contemporary American theater.

This post was originally published on Literature’s Next Frontier on March 21, 2008.

I have been pondering lately the situation of Revival Theater here in America and more specifically on Broadway. I myself have spent time working for a not-for-profit theater company that focused on revivals and have grown up with the idea that such endeavors are beneficial for the cultural growth of our community. I still believe in that today but I would like to consider with such an idea the reality of the amount of revive-able theater there is. So thinking about these two aspects, first the benefits of having older shows revived and second the amount of shows we can revive, I have come to consider the process in choosing what to revive when. This process is not something I’ve put much thought to in the past. When Cabaret opened a few years back I thought it was phenomenal. I loved it to the extent that I saw it five times before it closed. Never once though did I think about why Roundabout was putting it on now. What had compelled them to pick this production for this date? Perhaps they themselves didn’t have an answer for that but I find that hard to believe.

 

So I started there, thinking about these various aspects of revival culture and have begun to formulate some conclusions, obviously these conclusions are based around examples, recent ones that I had the good fortune to see last week. In the two examples I pondered the question of how one should pick what production to revive when.

 

Let me start with the bad case, South Pacific which is currently in preview at Lincoln Center in New York. The show is a classic work of theater and this current production stars Kelli O’Hara a contemporary master of theatrical performance. And yet I cite this as a bad case of theatrical revival. My parents, who I saw the show with, will cite the stage direction as the primary reason for disappointment. I agree with them but I found yet another problem. For me I felt that what I had seen was in essence and in form, a rerun. The idea disturbed me, have we forced theater into such a commercial atmosphere that what is being produced now is only the garbage we know was once successful? WHERE IS THE RISK! If I wanted to see the South Pacific from the 50s I would have rented the movie!

 

Now let me back up for a second here and clarify a few things. I do not mean to say that the show should have been altered to be set in a modern time, no that is not the essence of reviving a show. Rather the script needs to be looked at, the morals of the story evaluated and the director and crew need to ask themselves what their vision is. That is fundamental with reviving, a new vision, a new interpretation, a new show. If a director cannot discover some new vision in the work he is charged with reviving, than perhaps he should not be reviving it. Ultimately what I am suggesting is that revivals are not revivals but are productions of their own, that’s why we award the best a Tony each year. These are unique creative works that are both tied to the original as well as the contemporary culture to which they are presented.

 

This brings me to the second show, a show I believe greatly reflects the continued trends in our culture over how to deal with art and industry. Sunday in the Park with George, a wonderful Sondheim production which is currently being revived at Studio 54 by the Roundabout Theatre Company. Now first I am aware that this production is much more modern in its original than South Pacific and therefore lends itself better to being revised. However the themes of the original show are not all that is inspiring and encouraging about the current revival. This particular production utilized technology in a truly enhancing way. This new approach allowed for the production itself to do what the music and action already have mastered, create. When revived again, I can promise you that this show will not look like it does for the way in which this director has envisioned the story is unique, it is not a shadow of yesteryear as seen in South Pacific.

 

With that being said I’ll end with my opinion and hope it fosters a discussion. Revivals are unique, they are neither new productions nor reruns of old productions, they are a hybrid, a truly unique formula for producing a show that needs to be treated accordingly. In that treatment of such works the question of why must be easily answered by the audience. It is vision and relevance that pick the shows for revision, not original popularity. I love revivals, I love how they can connect today with yesterday by both honoring the history of theater while adding to it. In this respect South Pacific does not add to the culture of theater, it only mimics it. But seeing how it has already received much attention I may be wrong in how America wants to use the idea of revivals. Perhaps all we really want is mimicry. After all thousands perhaps millions more flock to museums than galleries, are we really so tied up in glorifying our past that we forget we have a present?

 

That is all,

Huysmans

Maybe Partying Will Help

This entry was originally posted on the now-deceased Literature’s Next Frontier on February 8th.

As the suspense of the U.S. presidential primaries continues on unbroken, I thought I’d just drop in to remind everyone that They are watching on in amusement as we vote on which of Their puppets They will string into the White House next.

Yes, I have been reading Pynchon. And no, I’m not serious, but the problem of co-opted resistance is one that has been bothering me lately. I am currently writing a thesis about the literature of the carnival, a time in which the norms and boundaries of society are temporarily removed in favor of universal hedonism, and I can’t decide what to think – is this really a form of transgression, or does it only reinforce the social norms that return once everyone goes back to work?

Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote one of the classic studies of carnival (or at least of Rabelais, whose work was a large part of its culture in France), thinks that carnival cannot be co-opted. Laughter, he says, will always remain a free weapon in the hands of the people. But I can’t see how laugh tracks are in any way in the people’s hands. Theodore Adorno, to pick on a particularly sad curmudgeon, argues that television comedy makes light of social inequalities to distract from their seriousness, and to keep people from feeling outrage where they rightly should. Couldn’t the carnival be seen in the same way? As a way of quelling all the people’s rebellious and transgressive urges at once in, say, one week of utter revelry, so that the rest of the year they will be docile?

It has been. The debate has been swinging in that direction since the 90s or so. But it hasn’t exactly ended. The original arguments for carnival’s power got sort of abstract after Bakhtin – Julia Kristeva writes that carnival forms are different from modern forms like television because in their language they do not allow for binary distinctions, instead letting opposites coexist. There is truth to this – the forms of parody that occurred in medieval carnival were not unilaterally negative as modern forms often are, but instead tore down and elevated at once, like insults exchanged jokingly between friends – but the way that sort of argument goes is too structuralist for the present taste. Mine too, but I still tend to agree with the conclusion even if I don’t like the argument. True dissent is possible, or at least I’d like to think so so much that I’m going to think so regardless.

But even if it’s possible, it might not happen much anymore. Kristeva agrees with Adorno that the supposed boundary-breaking we see in modern forms of humor (like, say, Family Guy) is evidence of nothing but a “law anticipating its own transgression;” in such cases, the transgression comes from the same system that makes the laws. If we accept that there is one, unified “system,” then this is certainly true. There’s where Pynchon comes in. The whole basis of his novels is the belief that everything is controlled by the same, invisible Force – both the squares and the rebels, both the Allies and the Axis. If we accept this, there can be no real escape because all the means of escape that are open to you have been specially designed to lead you right back into Their clutches. Scary.

But Pynchon writes satire. As much as I think Pynchon’s novels reflect on his times, I don’t take all the elaborate paranoid systems he constructs as anything more than grotesque absurdities. He’s not advocating that sort of thought – he’s making fun of it. I imagine he’s a bit of a paranoid himself, but I’m sure he’s painfully aware that it’s a delusion. What he’s saying with all the paranoia has more to do with our unfulfilled need for structure than with the actual order of our society. It’s more about the lack of structure in our world than anything. Of course I don’t think there’s a Them.

Even so, dissent is often corralled into a fenced-off place by one institution or another, and that must weaken its power to some extent. The obvious example is those “free-speech zones” from a few years back, but you can also think of television shows like South Park that break norms just to shock people – ultimately, this sort of comedy does nothing but underscore the norms that it breaks.

The solution, of course, is to avoid defining your new position in terms of the thing you’re trying to escape. This means that art must become ambivalent again. Art that leaves some of the thinking up to the reader can’t be filed away so easily as art that really, overtly attempts to tear things down – it’s better to let dissent flow than to crystallize it. And as for revelry, I’m all for it, but you shouldn’t just drink to forget.

~therighthandofnixon

Welcome to the Comparative Blogging Foundation

The Comparative Blogging Foundation is a project birthed from the former Literature’s Next Frontier as well as the evolution of the Avant-Garde based experimental art of the twentieth century. Today the Foundation acts as a repository for artistic experiments and discussions with a focus on exploring what art is today.

What is art? What role does it have in today’s world? What can be art? How does it exist in different facets of our lives? These are the questions we have started from and will use to explore the awesome potential of the contemporary scene.

The Foundation is just starting and was technically launched on March 20th, 2008. As this project develops we hope for the community of artists and art critics of the web to gather and engage the authors in the discussions established.

Thank you,

Huysmans,

Comparative Blogging Foundation