Category: Constellation: Year 2

A Critique of Constellation Module for this academic year

As I am currently obliged to give my thoughts on the autumn term constellation module again please allow me to be blunt. Autumn’s constellation module was a colossal waste of time. It wasn’t all terrible, the segment “how to we see the world” which discussed schemas and how our environment informs what we see was extremely illuminating, but the rest of it was rubbish. Most of it was not even focused on Art. I don’t care what word games you play, a pile of leaves in the woods is not Art. A protest in a shopping mall is not Art. People walking on a sand dune is not Art. ”But John?” I hear you say: “how do you define Art, then?” To which I respond: “I don’t. I reject your notion that social engineering or activism can be defined as Art through scientific sophistry. To try to define Art is to kill it, and to try make Art based on your definitions is to make rubbish and then to expect to be paid for it. Art is not a scientific law that can be studied, it is the moment of Zen when the archer releases the arrow. A good archer doesn’t need words to technically prove he has hit the target. That’s what the arrow is for. Just as a good archer is not defined by the words he uses, but by his work, so is an Artist. Even this is too strict and too concrete a definition to be of any actual use. Please never bother me with this again.”

As for the other things covered in term one, having made it clear that Art was , at best, a tangential interest, I have to say most of the course felt like soap boxing. A programme designed more for the indoctrination of liberal ideologies than to reach about self-expression. While I have no issues with environmentalism, or critiquing corporate culture, the fact that activist efforts to push these ideals were presented as Art (despite not being so) does reveal a clear agenda. “Art” representing a more conservative outlook was either not shown or simply does not exist. Either way, no modern Art that conflicted with the lecturers’ views was presented to us. Some of our reading material also had a heavy political bias. The essay “In Freefall” is little more than a sustained attack on Western Culture from a woman whose nation has plenty of blood on its own hands.

Where my patience with the course ran out was the segment “who is other?” the reading for which was little more than a checklist of modern identity politics talking points, presenting women, non-whites and non-heterosexuals as victims by the mere act of existing. Anyone who is straight, white and male is automatically living a life of luxury. This I genuinely do object to on an ideological level. I won’t turn this into a debate, but I feel that I have been quite successfully “othered” for most of my life despite, if not in some cases because of, being straight, white and male. The proposed reading didn’t even seem to attempt to talk about Art using the loosest interpretation of that word. Thankfully on the day of the lecture I was ill and could not attend, which is good because I fear I would have lost my temper. The University system in the west is in some quarters seen as a joke, little more than a liberal indoctrination ground and money scam. This isn’t the first time the system has managed to live up to that stereotype. During my foundation year one of our lecturers used his position firstly to decry the supposed patriarchy and secondly to make us watch Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and never got round to talking about Art.

But the system can be better than this. Most of the Art teachers I have had have been sincere and qualified. The animation staff here at Cardiff Met are a fine group, but it seems constellation could be renamed “indoctrination”. I would like to point out one of the segments questioning what our responsibility as Artists to the wider world is seemed only to exist to encourage the idea that we should be activists first and Artists – third perhaps.

If my arguments make no impact, perhaps the staff should consider whether they would have approved if rather than showing us “an Inconvenient Truth” our foundation leader had instead read aloud from “The Art of the Deal” . Using your platform as an Art teacher to push personal politics is dishonest, regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum.

I will say, though, the segment “What About Pleasure?” while still built on the idea that I dislike, that Art needs to be justified, did give me some interesting things to think about. The comparison between the two types of pleasure defined by Nietzsche has stuck with me.

Constellation in the spring term has been trying. Despite all my efforts I wasn’t able to get my head around the proposed research method, using the online articles catalogue. I was eventually allowed to study via printed books, which suited me better. I can honestly say I’ve never put this much effort into reading in my life, but I fear I burned out rather quickly. I hope what I have acquired will prove to be enough. At the least, I was able to read about subjects that interested me, which was a nice change. I don’t really feel the unstructured environment (exacerbated later by the pandemic) is the best in which to study. They seem to want you to study in a particular way, show your workings in a particular way, and come to conclusions in a particular way, but they don’t tell you this. It feels like being asked to build a house when you have no knowledge of masonry, and not even knowing what sort of house the client wants. Building blindly and just hoping that what you make will satisfy. I still say this time would be better spent just letting me make animation.

Making Art

People make art for many reasons. For a cause, for money, for therapy. As a time waster, as a way of expressing one’s self, as a private expression, for company, to preserve memories, as a way of bonding with others, or just for sheer beauty. But the inalienable fact is that people make art. Art does not appear out of the ether or grow on trees. People make art. But I feel sometimes we forget this. We subconsciously think of art as something that manifests into the world through its own magnificence. Complete in its vision of itself. When I show people works I have made people assume the thing on page is exactly what was in my head. The opposite is normally true. When I see one of my own works what I see is 50% my own limitations of skill, 49% mistakes, and 1% my vision.

There are two schools of thought on how to treat art that are as opposed to each other as they both tyrannical. The Death of the Author. Which states that anyone’s take on the work is a valid as the creator’s. Which in practice means the critic doesn’t have to listen to facts and reason. If someone wants to say that The Lion King is a vicious character-assassination of the poor they don’t have to care about what the actual point of the filmmakers or what actually happens in the film (Timon and Pumbaa are not only “poor” in as much as wild animals can be but they don’t even own land. Making them poorer than Hyenas. And the “Rich/poor” divide is at best a minor theme in the movie). The fallacy of Death of the author is “The Author’s take on their work is just as valid as anyone elses, no more or less” this argument ignores that having facts will make your take more or less valid. And with the exception of Stephen King on Cujo the author always has more facts about the work than anyone-else (King was suffering from drug addiction at the time and claims to have no memory of writing that book). Normally once someone has taken Death of the Author to heart they will only accept their own take on the work. Having disposed of the person who knows the work best they have no reason to listen to anyone-else. They are right by virtue of being right.

The other idea that is just as dictatorial is the maxim “There is no art. Only artists!” That the artist is the true work of importance and the work is just a vehicle to promote the artist. An artist can declare anything to be art and said art about whatever they say it is with little work put into making the work speak for itself. The work only has value because the artist made it.

I call both these terms dictatorial and tyrannical very deliberately. These two philosophies put their respective beneficiaries on a god-like pedestal. The Critic or the Artist can now perform alchemy and turn one substance into another at will. The critic can declare a work about anything they want and all must bow down to them. The artist can make anything art and cannot be challenged or told they have failed. One speaks divine truth, the other is divine.

And make no mistake. These two concepts are at odds with each-other. When people tried to reinterpret Duchamp’s over-discussed urinal as a statement about the beauty of forms in “dirty” objects, calling it a “Buddha of the Bathroom” Duchamp was furious. His work was meant to be read in the way he intended and nothing else.

 

I have many problems with both these outlooks. But one thing I’d like to point out is how both of them somewhat erase the idea that art is something that is made, over time, with human effort and human error.

The critic treats the work as if it just appeared out of nowhere. Exactly as it was meant to be. The postmodern artist cannot afford to admit to any flaw or failure for fear of their magical aura fading away. And many modern artists don’t even make anything at all. Some just find objects and claim they have made them art or just have abstract thoughts can call them art. Art as something that is made by human hands over time is something that is being obscured by these ideas.

The way people make art is rarely discussed beyond maybe the most technical details. Perspective, two-thirds framing, colour theory. That sort of thing. But the way people go about making art as shown in books and movies is almost comical. The artist will either be lying on their sofa despondently or making a frustrated, impotent attempt at making a failing piece work. And then inspiration strikes them and in a manic display of energy they start making the work flawlessly. And the end result is exactly as they envisage it.

Maybe this is more proof of my incompetence than erroneous presentation, but in my experience it’s nothing like that at all.

Making art isn’t a transfer of an idea straight into the physical world. It’s a journey.

 

There are three phases in making a work of art. The mental, the Physical, and finishing the thing. Let’s start with the physical.

For the sake of good faith I must point out that a lot of what I write is based on my work in animation, which is what I’m studying. It may have biased me in some areas. But I have limited experience with writing, painting, metal work, photography, and most importantly sculpture, which I almost chose over animation. I feel all the things I say here are just as applicable to them as they are to animation.

 

Making art is tiring. It doesn’t always involve a lot of movement. But it can wear on your body. I’ve flopped down on my bed exhausted after working on pieces. That’s rare, but it does happen. And when you get tired it will affect the quality of your work. Sometimes it makes it better, normally it doesn’t.

While getting tired is rare I have on other occasions gotten my fingers or fingertips sore from sculpting work, my eyes tired and arms sore after life drawing. And it’s not uncommon after a lot of work for one’s head to feel heavy and sore. Like huge chunks of one’s brain have been replaced with sand. When any of these things happen it’s often best just to give up and go home for the day. You’re not getting you’re peak back today (Though I’m guessing many professional artists just have to work in this state or risk losing money. I hope when the time comes I will stand my ground).

Everything you do has limits. God only knows how different all the classic art works would have been if you could have given there makers all the tools we have today. But even living in the present day I am limited by what pencils I can afford. What paper I can get ahold of. What camera’s I can find at short notice. The lighting I can work with. How much information and reference I can find. And hundreds of other factors. I’m not saying this to whine or to make excuses for poor work but to point out just how much the limitations I have end up shaping the work in ways people don’t consider.

There’s also repetition. One thing that is never brought up in films about artists is how much repetition there is when making art. Oh the repetition can really get you down. I supposes seeing one person doing the same thing over and over again doesn’t make the greatest cinema. But it really does get to the core of how the idea that art is made is sort of erased from our culture. The thing about it that’s odd about is it can be positive and negative for both you and your work. It can obviously really drag. But it can also be soothing or even uplifting. And strangely it not always a case of one then the other. Sometimes it will start out soothing and turn into a drag, but sometimes it will happen the other way round. And sometimes it only goes one way. It can just be relaxing, or it can just be a drag. The latter is more likely if the repetitious action takes a long time to do for each cycle. If the action is complex or delicate it is likely to strain the mind. It’s harder to keep track of all the things that need to be done. And sadly when it’s something like this that’s when you need to be concentrating the most, even though this is when it’s the hardest. Sometimes when the repetition is just a drag and it’s making your brain hurt its best just walk away for a bit. But once again sometimes that’s not an option.

That’s how repetition can be good and bad emotionally. But it also effects the quality of your work regardless of your emotional state. I should point out that not all repetition in making art is necessary, but it is often useful for saving time or getting a consistent quality of work, this is great. But it has drawbacks. As time makes the idea fade you start deviating from the effect you’re trying to repeat. This is well documented effect. Listen to Homer Simpson from 1990, 2005, and 2019 and they’ll sound like three separate people. There are ways you can work to prevent this. Visual aids and strong plans can do a lot to keep you on track. But to err is to be human. And the big downside of choosing to use repetition is how it gets in the way of being creative. A non-repetitive approach will always give you more freedom to express yourself and make a more striking impression. Every second you’re just repeating yourself is time you aren’t learning or growing as an artist. In fact you can start stagnating and loosing skill. While you grow impatient you might start experimenting on side. Adding in little differences to try to find something new. On occasion you’ll find a better way of working. But what’s more likely is you’ll mess up the whole project.

And of course there’s time, as I alluded to above. The greatest of man’s adversaries. Even non-artists know stories of movies and games that came out bad because of time restraints. But it’s not like if things are going well time is just a non-factor If you’re being smart (Which I’m often not) you are always cutting things down or simplifying them just to save time. It hurts. But it has to be done. I’m only now starting to get the hang of how to do it and how important it is.

 

And of course one is always limited by skill. I don’t think that ever changes no matter how good you get.

 

 

So that’s the physical work. But making art is just as much about the thinking you do as the work you do with your hands.

The hardest part is when the whole thing is in your head. You have a glimmer in your head, or you have a group all goals you know you have to achieve. But you don’t know how to turn them into a consistent, solid idea you twist and tweak and try to make things match up. Yes sometimes you do have that big moment of inspiration I mentioned earlier. And I tend to get those moments more often than most or so it seems. Art teachers hate those big moments of vision because they want you to write about all the failed experiments you made before finding the right idea. And if you just have a great vision from the start people get cross. If everyone had these movements as often as do art teachers wouldn’t care so much.

But moments like this still aren’t the norm. Even for me it’s more common to have a flash of one strong idea and then having to flesh it out. More often when I have to is sit down and just think. No distractions. Just asking myself what I want to accomplish and that isn’t working. I sometimes go round in circles trying to hit a breakthrough. I put all the facts in order and try to see what works. And if I’m being smart I’m taking notes (I’m usually not). As I keep saying, your vision for the work fades over time. You can get bits of it or even the whole thing back in moments of clarity. But you have to work and think even when the vision is dull. When you’re fleshing out the ideas or adding in new ones to tie things together you may get one of those moments of clarity and realize the fleshed out or new ideas don’t quite fit your original vision. When that happens you can throw the new ideas out, abandon the vision, or tweak things so the new ideas and the original vision mesh. The third option is usually the correct one but sometimes you have to use one of the other two.

It’s not like once you have your eureka moment the magnificent vision in your head stays there, perfectly clear. It fades and warps. New ideas come in and distract you. And sometimes things are just forgotten until way later. And that can cause some annoying reworking you never wanted to do. And sometimes those bright ideas never come back. And that’s one of the hardest parts to bare.

 

Around this point is when you start making concept art. This part is always depressing. Trying to wrestle the ideas out into paper as they look and feel in your head and it never being good enough. I suspect this would be easier if I was better at drawing. But there are also gaps in your mental images that you don’t notice until the thing is on the page and you realize you don’t know where you actually wanted that guy standing. Obviously that shows why this stage is so important, but it’s grating as all hell to find one of these mental gaps. And it can take some serious reworking to iron these kinks out.

 

But in the end you’ll have a strong enough idea that you’re almost ready to get started. But before you do there’s another annoying phase to go through. Deciding how you’re going to it.

Hopefully some of this will have been covered in the first two stages. But you WILL have to really think hard about how you’re going to make the thing at some point. This stage is often depressing because it’s where you have to make compromises. What to cut, what to rush what to tone down. For me this hurts in particular because the concept art I make is often too detailed for good animation and I have to tone it down. It hurts.

 

When finally getting down to work it’s tempting to believe that the thinking stops and you just produce it like a machine, and in some small parts that will be the case. But for the most part if you want the work to be good you don’t stop thinking once you start working. You work and think. You can just go at it like machine. But if you are still think while you’re working you’ll be more engaged with the work and it will be better.

The natural flow of work will throw up new challenges all the time, unless maybe you’re a pro I guess. But if you’re doing well you’ll rise to meet them. There’s always something new to learn about your field.

This next bit is very true of animation, maybe more so than other mediums, or maybe this is just a me thing. But one the big intellectual challenges of making art is always switching gears. Once a piece of the work is done and I have to start a new scene or a new stage in the work my creative energy just grinds to halt and I almost have to reorient myself and start again. Art isn’t like marathon running were you can find a grove and stick with it.

There is downside to keeping your brain engaged like this. For me at least my perfectionism starts kicking in. Even when I’m not making actual mistakes I know what I’m doing could be better. There’s no frame of animation that I couldn’t trace better. No pose that couldn’t be a little more realistic.  Normally in the early stages of a project it’s very easy to get lost in this kind of perfectionism. It’s only later when time starts getting short that I wise up and start cutting corners. It would probably be better if I had a consistent pace of work across the board.

When I start making mistakes I sadly often act in way that makes the problem. I have spent hours trying make the expression of a character just right. And then I find my corrections are even worse than the original. And as I try to bring it back to the original that I didn’t like but at least suggested the feeling that I was going for I trip up more and more and become so frenzied that I tear the paper with my eraser.  I know this is a very animation-specific example. I’m sure there are equivalents in other mediums.

 

Going back to that big burst of passion and inspiration you always see in movies and books. That does happen. But it’s a short affair. The real test is keeping going after it subsides. Day in, day out. And then continuing to keep going when you’re so tired you have no idea why you’re doing this. When you look at your notes and can’t remember why you decided to do that that way and you just have to put faith in your past self that he made the right call. Even if it seems insane.

 

 

My father, who once worked in television, once said that a movie is never finished, it just stops. And I finishing a work is always hard. Even if you have all the bits you need there’s still more you can do. There’s always more you can do. Choosing what to do as you get closer to that deadline is hairpullingly stressful. But in the end you have to pull it all together. And as you do you spot a hundred extra flaws that you don’t have time to fix. And all the pieces never fit together as well as you like. You try to do something to fix it. And sometimes there’s a little you can do. But fate will out and you have to stop.

 

 

With everything I have covered here do you see why I hate this idea of the erasure of the Making of Art? This brilliant struggle is something we should respect. I know this must sound like I’m throwing myself a pity party. That’s not my intent. I’m simply trying to point out just how untrue the ideas of art appearing from nothing and appearing perfectly as intended truly are. (And maybe there is some bitterness towards postmodern artists who put in no work at all as well).

I don’t want to fetishize the suffering of the artist. Fetishizing suffering is never good (Except in the actual fetish community where the context and meaning of both those words is very, very different). An artist doesn’t HAVE to suffer to make good work. But we shouldn’t be ashamed of it either.

I don’t want to suggest that the amount of work is a factor in judging the final pieces quality either. Some of the worst movies and games had tons of work poured into them by people who were trying their hardest in an impossible situation. It’s tragic. But it doesn’t change the reality for the consumer. Conversely if hypothetically ‘The Godfather’ had been the easiest film in the world to make due to the skill of all involved it would not be less of a film for it,

 

The point I want to make is that art not magic. It’s hard work. When we’re young we think of art as magic. I remember the first time I tried to write a book. I sat down with pencil and piece of paper (It was 2001, Most tweens didn’t own computers back then) and waited for the story to just appear. Obviously I’m wiser now. But I feel like both the ideas of Death of the Author and No Art only Artists both unintentionally try to carry this child-like idea of artworks as magical into adulthood. But it’s not true.

 

A few days ago I discovered that the version of Simple Minds’ Don’t you (Forget About Me) that I’ve been listening to for 15 years is a radio edit. The full song is 7 minutes long. And now I’ve heard the full thing it’s more beautiful than ever. And the song’s composition makes a lot more sense. I thought I had the full story about the song. But there was more to learn.

It’s the same with all real works of art. There’s so much more beneath the surface, more intended by the music than I knew. And every art work is like this. The finished work is only a shadow of the making of it. And if we could see the full work it would be a thousand times more amazing. That is far more magical than treating the work like it came out the ether could ever be.

A look back on Constellation this term.

This was a waste of time.

 

I really was hoping I’d learn something here. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t care for modern art. I feel most art from the 1970s onwards has become a self-serving mess. Full of artists who don’t make art but only put on a spectacle to get people to talk about them. Tracey Emin and Damian Hirst don’t make art. They make promotions for the Emin and Hirst brands. The statement “There is no art, only artists” has become an excuse for artists to turn themselves into rock stars who don’t make music but just talk about how great they are for existing. I hoped would find my expectations challenged, learn about something cool that I could actually like. Or at least come to understand modern art a bit better and maybe gain a bit of respect for the modern art scene. I was disappointed on all fronts.

We didn’t really tackle the question of the problems and possibilities of modern art as was promised. We were just shown somethings modern art has done and maybe expected to like it.

 

The pitch was, “For many people contemporary art is both too easy (it often doesn’t seem to require any particular artistic skill) and too difficult”. I’ve always fallen into former camp. I’ve never really felt it was hard to understand. It’s often opaque. But a lengthy explanation of why it exists is always nearby. (And this isn’t even a modern thing. Many classical paintings are impenetrable without the title to tell you what’s happening and totally opaque if you don’t have a strong knowledge of The Bible or Greek myth).  But I’ve always felt it was too easy to make (Or in many cases it is never “made” at all), and that I can understand the nonsense being spewed just fine. But I was really hoping maybe I would find out I was a little wrong. Just see that there was something in the modern art scene that I was missing. But I was disappointed again. The past six weeks have been me staring into the void of modern art. Hearing arguments and sentiments I’d already heard. Not feeling my intellect challenged at all. Just wishing this would end so I could put effort into my real work.

The idea that this stuff could help my animation work is a joke. This is if anything a drain. It diverts mental energy that could be going into the course I’m meant to be doing or the writing I should be doing about said real work

 

 

The First week of Constellation was the hardest. We were given the most texts of any week and they were the hardest to understand. I was afraid the whole term would be like this. Dense philosophical texts that would make my head hurt. I certainly put more effort into that first journal than any other. I actually tried to make arguments of my own. But it was also the one I found the most disappointed by.

I hoped it would be a look into where art is right now. Instead I found myself knee deep in post-modernist “Narratives are dead” BS that ironically is a narrative. A lot of self-aggrandizement over how the evils of modernism have been slain and pondering how to express one’s self in a narrative free world. But nothing about art or where it actually is. Just where these intellectuals want to go. The irony is they claim narratives are dead but they can only see their own narrative and nothing-else. Like the fish that doesn’t know it swims in water. Why can’t we talk about what art is rather than what non-artists want it to be?

Again. I don’t feel like my mind is being expanded. Just that I’m hearing the same old rubbish.

In short. The first week felt like a debate over question that never needed to be asked. Something I would feel again later.

 

Week 2 got off to a very bad start. I hated Hito Steyerl’s essay “In Freefall” so much I had to write my own response to it separate from my regular journal. I guess it wouldn’t be a Constellation term without at least one reading assignment that made me regret being alive. But this year it wasn’t because it was badly written but because the ideas in it were so bad.

 

The theme “What does the world look like?” Doesn’t seem to have anything to do with last week’s theme or the main them at all. If you believe the question is in doubt it will always be in doubt. It’s an eternal question. Not a contemporary one.

The next question was “What are our responsibilities [as artists] to the wider world?” I do at least agree this is an important question, even if I stand by my stance that artists are not social actors and shouldn’t be obliged to make socially conscious art unless they choose to. The only limit I’d agree to is that artists shouldn’t call for real-world violence.

I feel like the whole exercise was just a subtle attempt at trying to make an activist out of me. I resent this attempt to try to shape my political views.

And once again. If you believe artist have some ethical responsibility to the world then what that is an eternal question more than a contemporary one.

We weren’t really shown much art. Just substandard activism posing as art to seem more relevant. So not only is the contemporary part missing, but so is art. It reminds me of when a lecturer in Treforest made us all watch ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. It had nothing to do with art. He just really cared about environmentalism. I’m all for saving the planet. But using our art course that we paid for to lecture us on your politics is a pure abuse of power and waste of our time.

 

The final question. What, if any, role should pleasure have in art is at least interesting and about art again. But again it feels like a non-question given way more thought than it needs. What is the place of pleasure in art? Art, or at least good art, is inherently pleasurable and that is not a bad thing. Case closed.

 

I reread all the journals I posted this term. And I feel like I tried really hard to engage with this course. My responses very long reads. But I got nothing out of this. Just pain. I feel like all that has happened is I’ve had all my biases about the worthlessness of modern art reconfirmed. I’ve had weeks lost answering dumb question that never needed to be asked or explored.

This wasted time I could have spent on animation.

What about pleasure? My response

I think we may have hit upon the most pointless discussion in art. Not that it’s an unworthy topic, but I’m surprised it’s generated more than five minutes discussion.

We we asked to consider the role of pleasure in art. Which to me seems like asking if one should taste while eating. Art, good art at least, is inherently pleasurable. I don’t know what argument could be made to counter this notion. And since the material we we given was highly biased towards combating this idea that art should be unpleasurable it seems I’m never going to know. I feel like we’re not having our intellects truly challenged here. When outlining Aristotle’s five proof’s of God Aquinas included multiple arguments against God to show what he was arguing against to show he was serious. Here I feel I’m being asked to slay a dragon that is already dead and who never even got to capture any fair maidens.

Well. I will go one further. I will not only slay this dead beast. But i will do so in a way as to so the farce and artifice of this whole execution. Show how this great task was never anything but a parody of knighthood set up by jesters who have deluded themselves into thinking they are knights.

 

The first piece of pre-reading we were given was a journal by Dieter Roelstratete called ‘How About Pleasure?’ Certainly in keeping with the theme.

Roelstratete asks if our ‘bodily enjoyment, the invocation of any form of pleasure, visual or otherwise align the work of museum curators with the “evil forces of Entertainment?”’ 

I wouldn’t worry about that Mr Roelstratete. No entertainment is to be found in modern art. What isn’t trying to disgust the viewer is so abstract it would faint at the thought of providing the viewer with anything but “Art”. Pleasure included.

 

It is not difficult to make funny art. Comic strip writers across the globe and the internet do it every week. If you mean “fine art” How about MC Eicher Salvador Dali and Matiess? It can be done if you have something to say and say it clearly. I fear what you mean is funny postmodern art. Which cannot be funny because it has to be explained to the viewer. And if you have to explain a joke, there is no joke.

I will agree with him that pleasure is spurned on the grounds of being considered Atopical. How a work makes one feel, specially if it makes you feel good. Is considered more and more a divergence at best and a con at worst

I know I’ve said this question of what is wrong with pleasure seems groundless. But this is a topic that goes back at least to ancient Greece. Rightly or wrongly, people have been arguing against it for some time. Movements like the gnostics have argued that all that is of this world is wrong and sinful since before the advent of Christianity. I suppose some of this purisanism my have seped into the art world over time. But normally these extreme self-denial movements have no love for art at all. It seems foolish to court the sympathies of people who will never like you for the sake of respectability. If critics really have taken to Artistic Catharism then they’re best ignored. I don’t know why these ideas are being talked about as if they were the norm. 

 

Roelstraete seems to struggle with the idea that people might like art for its own sake. He seems to think people approach it with the intellect first and only like it if it is intellectually consistent as if we were Vulcans listening to Mozart. What about beauty? Does Roelstratete not know that people love art because it is beautiful and inspires positive feelings within them? Is the taint of modern art so deep we have forgotten what beauty is? Beauty doesn’t need to make us feel happy. The Dead Christ Mourned by Annibale Carracci is a beautiful painting, even though it is heartrending to look at.

It captures our emotions first and then engages our minds. This real emotional experience, even if it hurts, is still a positive reaction to beauty that is a reason to love art in and of itself.

 

Another thing Roelstratete says that baffles me is that enjoying art is a guilty pleasure. Art is far from a guilty pleasure. One is seen as a stiff for not liking it. I’ve never even heard of people above the age of 12 feeling guilty in taking pleasure in art. Be they causal art fans or fanatics. I know Roelstratete is a curator and thus meets differnt people to me. But I feel he may have mistaken the views of his clique as those of the whole world.

 

The one video we we’re given to watch seemed to be in harmony with my view that it is seen as a greater sin to not enjoy something than to enjoy it. It was a sample of two talks give my the modern philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I’m not not if i can say much beyond I agreed with most of what he said and he seems like a really fun guy and he’d be great to talk to. So here’s the video in full

 

 

After that we were give two questions to consider.

  • Is pleasure a primary purpose of art?
  • Is pleasure in art and design a consequence of producing a successful image / object?

To which all I can say is.

1: Depends on the artwork

2: Hopefully yes. Some art will be enjoyed ironically like “The Room”. But all good art will produce some sort of pleasure. Even of it is not happiness. It’s tempting to think of plesure and happiness as the same thing. But they aren’t. A sad piece of music doesn’t make one happy. But it does give pleasure. Not that a work giving happiness is a bad thing either.

 

 

Then we had the obligitor lecture and slideshow. Here are some thoughts inspired by what we were given.

 

Something we were asked to consider early on is this maxum “If we like something that is neither useful or morally good, then it must be because it gives us pleasure” 

Four thoughts on that. 

1: I’d be wary of taking this as an absolute. It sounds good enough as a general rule. But hard enough thought may produce exceptions.

2:I feel this maxum comes with the implication that if something isn’t useful or morally good but gives us pleasure that that is the least of the three categories. That it’s the least worthy reason to care about a work. Which I disagree with. We value people because they give us pleasure. And while part of maturing is learning to value people even if they don’t, that illogical first step is what allows us to love people rather than treating them like machines or objects.

3: Another unfortunate implication I must address is that you can only be one of these things. This is a dangerous misconception. Things that are morally good are almost always useful. Things that are useful can be fun with the right mindset. And things that are fun can be morally good, useful, or both at the same time! As a child I eat up the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness video (VHS) series. I was learning at a prodigious rate and enjoying myself the whole time. Finding a new one was a joy. Sometimes people are down and need company. Being with them can be hard. But sometimes it can be fun as their mood comes around. And even when these three qualities don’t overlap completely they will overlap somewhat. It is rare that something is only Useful, Morally good, or Enjoyable.

4: Most importantly, art is fun. I’d argue most art is not particularly useful or morally good. We enjoy Turner for his colours, Miro for his rhythms, Hitchcock for his suspense, and Colleridge for his beauty. Art is a truly sensual experience that we gorge ourselves on first and analyze later. And that’s a good thing. Art that is only focused on being useful quickly turns into a PSA. Dry, cold, and worthless once new data supplants it. Art that focuses on being morally good will quickly turn into sermonising and belittling it audience. And in both cases it erases the need for quality. The revisionist fairy tales of a woman with no understanding of plot, pacing, spelling, grammar, and even the meaning of the words she uses will be held in higher regard than the works of Grimm and Perrault because they preach of the virtues of abortion and diversity hiring in this society. If this seems acceptable to you as a model for critique, think of a society you don’t agree with and imagine a similarly awful work being held up as masterpiece because it preaches abstinence only education and male superiority. Not so appealing this model of virtues before pleasure now is it?  

The Work of Homer has not stayed relevant to us because it is useful or moral (Though one could make arguments to say it has qualities of both). It stays with us because a great story with compelling characters is always going to be pleasurable. And that’s not a bad thing. It can be the backbone of a whole civilization. 

 

I’d like to address something that’s inspired by the question asked above.

There’s an idea that if we enjoy something it somehow dilutes the other two qualities. That the usefulness or moralness of the work is tainted because we enjoyed it. That we should live our artistic lives in puritiantic discomfort. That the virtues of the work are made more virtuous by being unpleasurable. Any psychologist or religious scholar will tell you that is not only bunk but it is both dangerous and conceited. Dangerous because inflicting suffering upon yourself for the sake of suffering is never good and can even get in the way of doing good. Conceited because it’s easy to fetishise suffering. To constantly put one’s-self on the back for suffering so well and snubbing those who are working harder than you are, but not suffering as much as you’d like, At that point your serving you own ego rather than doing any good.

This is more general life advice, But it is probably just as applicable to art.

 

 

The first type of pleasure we had to look at in art was humour. The examples we were given were at best, able to raise a micro smile. Modern artists are no Chaplins.

 

The other problem with modern art trying to be funny is just how seriously it takes itself. When artists view themselves as gods with magical powers come to guide morals towards the light the sheer seriousness in which they hold their duty is a detriment to trying to be funny. It’s like that one gamer who is always in character. They’re just not fun to be around

The way modern art tries to be funny is also rather flat. It tries to be ugly and gross, and a little vulgar, Like the artstyle of South Park or Beavis and Butthead is ugly, gross, and a little vulgar. But the thing is, that’s just the visual style. It doesn’t help make those things funny. It’s probably good they aren’t expending a lot of effort into looking nice. Saves time. But if an ugly and vulgar art style was all that was needed Family Guy would still be funny. All modern art does to try to be funny is use an unpleasant style and leave it at that. It is pure style before substance.

 

We were asked “Is it okay to ‘fart in art”.’ Does art have to be polite? In my opinion, no. But it does affect the tone you will have. If you want to evoke tears it’s best not to have a silly artstyle and make your subject very fat clowns. Just saying. Everything has its place. It’s okay to fart in art, sometimes. But it is also okay, and sometimes necessary, to not fart in art. 

 

Another thing I don’t get. I’m told time and again that everything is art, or anything can be art. No matter how much I refute it it never goes away. So if everything is art, then art being pleasurable is of paramount importance. Because if we are not allowed to enjoy art then we are literally not allowed to enjoy anything

Even if we go with  less extreme “Anything can be art” idea then the artist alchemist is now waving their magic wand and saying “This is now art, and now you may never enjoy it”.

Both the ideas that art should be non-pleasurable and that the Artist is an alchemist who can turn anything into art whenever they want money for no work are bad ideas. But put together they become an apocalyptically idea.  

So I feel the question of if art can be fun or funny is a non-question. If there is any reason to ask if art can be either it’s because postmodern art has drained both qualities from the art world and its attempts to re-inject them back into art  are hamstrung by the above reasons. Modern art is trying to fix a problem it created and doing so poorly.

 

Another point that is brought up is how children enjoy some modern art pieces like they were toys or play areas. The fact that these things can be enjoyed on such a basic level is a point of concern. I don’t think this matters. We experience works on many levels as we grow up. And that is not a bad thing. It’s not bad that we can enjoy art differently in different times in our lives. It’s the same with music, books and films, why not art? It’s not a mark of shame that something can be enjoyed by a child. I got into Shakespeare when I was 11.

That’s not to say that it’s bad if your art if your art isn’t appealing to younger people. It’s fine to have a particular audience in mind. A movie like ‘The Tree of Life‘ would never appeal to children and doesn’t appeal to many adults. I would not want it changed to accommodate more people. But it isn’t trying to force people out on purpose. It’s just trying to tell its story in its own way.

If doing that gives you big audience that’s fine. And if doing gives you a niche audience that’s also fine. Having people outside your chosen circle like your art is not a sign of failure or on your part or to live up to some invisible standard we have to follow.

Art should not be a club for serious, educated people in their 40s only.

 

The second type of pleasure we were given was eroticism and the body.

The examples we were given here were very poor. Modern art is too abstract and cold to be erotic. The most erotic thing in the world is the human soul. We are attracted to people for their persona and how we want that persona to interact with us. A bored and lathargic strippler will never turn someone on, no matter what her body is. She has to play the part of someone enticing. Pretend to be interested in the men around her. That is the erotic element. All the work we were shown had all the humanity (And often the presence of humans at all) surgically removed from it. Vague colours and shapes played to the sound of a woman’s breathing isn’t inviting the viewer to do anything.  A pile of bodies in a sculpture may as well be a meat display if the people have no life to them.

 

The final type of pleasure we were offered was abstraction itself. Getting to the nub of all this I suppose. But how this is meant to be pleasurable in a sensual way I can’t imagine. And I really have nothing to say about what we were shown. It was okay abstract art. Nothing special. I don’t find abstract art gives any more or less happiness or sensual pleasure than other art. It’s just about it the art is good or not. 

 

And that’s it. I don’t really have a concluding statement. I looked at all the stuff and it feels like a rather pointless thought exercise. Why did i even bother?

Constellation : What are my responsibilities to the wider world?

I went into this one thinking it was going to hurt. It did. But not as much as I imagined.

 

I feel this one wasn’t as philosophical as the pre-reading promised it would be. We were given questions like

– Is there, or should there be, any overlap between ethics and aesthetics?

– Bishop quotes a description of Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument as ‘social pornography’. What does this mean? Can you think of any other artworks that could be described this way?

-If an artwork has a function can its value as art be judged by its ability to fulfill its function?

To which I will give my answers here.

1: No. The artist should be free to draw what they want

2: I’d guess ‘social pornography’ would be showing off or glorifying aspects of a different or alien society to a gratuitous degree that it becomes disgusting or condescending.I think some western media’s portrayal of African, Indian, First Nation, and Buddhist cultures often fall into this trap. Showing these cultures as spiritual utopias where sin and suffering just don’t exist.

3: It can but it’s a very crude and basic way of assessing things. ‘A Serbian Film’ sets out to shock and disgust. It does so very well. But that’s not an engaging or worthwhile experience. Transformers 2 was only made to make money, which it did. To call either good just because they did what they meant to do is setting the bar very low.

 

If I may just respond to the concept here. I don’t think artists have responsibilities beyond don’t intentionally try to incite acts of violence.

The same people who call for a code of intersectional feminism to be supported and preached by all of art are the ones who would scream and rant the loudest about conservatives asking for media to do the same thing but with religious morals. Saying there’s a moral code all art must follow presupposed you know what is best for everyone. If you think that, you are wrong.

And on top of the aforementioned hypocrisy and vanity there the fact I feel art should have the right to be apolitical. Look at the art of Kandinsky and Klee, the music of Bach, or the games of Sega and Nintendo. They were not made to make a point, but they are beautiful. Yes I know they were inspired by the political world they were shaped in, and can have meaning ascribed to them via context. But that’s not why they exist or why people love them. These and millions of other pieces were not made as activism. They were made to be, and are, transcendent of any political, moral or activist statement that a picky critic can place upon them.  

 

But sadly the questions we we’re given were nowhere near as interesting as the ones I imagined we’d get.

 

The first piece of reading we were given was a journal called ‘The Social Turn’ by Claire Bishop. And we’re already off to a bad start. 

We open with a quote from someone called Dan Graham that goes “All artists are alike. They all dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art”. To which I say, speak for yourself dude. I would love nothing more than to make art that is less social than collaborative. I would pay to be able to make art that is less social and collaborative.

I’d like to point out we already have works of art that rely on mass collaboration. Movies,  games, animation and even comics. The snobbery of Fine/conceptual/postmodern art knows no bounds. If the “real” art world didn’t make it it doesn’t count. And anything can be art but we won’t acknowledge anything we don’t like.

 

Bishop herself seems unsure of what she is preaching beyond “More social and collaborative” She isn’t even sure what to name her ideas for collaborative art

I think dialogic or participatory art are the best terms Bishop suggests for what she is trying to describe. Her ideas involve art that instead of being made by one person art made by a group or community working to express mutually. The terms “Dialogic, or Participatory” show that if all aren’t pulling their weight or letting one take the lead the idea isn’t working.

 

For a new idea Bishop has a bit too much faith in her concept. She claims  “There can be no failed unsuccessful unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond”. To which I say

1: You’ve never seen group a people fail miserably to get along have you?

2: Logically if the art fails to strengthen the social bond then by this metric it is a pure failure.

3: If the social bond and not what the art looks like is what matters then it is being held to the same standard as school play basically. If this art has the same value as a local women’s karaoke group why should I care? Single artists have done way better work.

Here’s a jaw droppin My Little Pony fan animation made by one person 

And here’s a man who got his 1980’s printer to play Take on Me 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Modern art is nepotism. What Bishop is proposing is trash. But because it’s part of the art scene it will be important trash.

The arrogance doesn’t end there. While praising a trio of collaborative postmodern artists from Turkey she states that Turkey NEEDs Non-object based art [My words, not hers] because Turkey still being largely based in painting and sculpture is an inherently bad thing. I love how postmodernists claim to hate colonialistion so much, but when they see culture doing things differently or in a way they see as outdated they say it has to change. No consistency.

 

Bishop seems to wax and wane on the importance of non-artists getting involved in these works is. Her Turkish tro are just leading other people by the hand and doing all the thinking work. But she really does seem to think the point of these works is to help out real people. Even though she also seems to believe the old lie that everyone is/will one day be an artist,

Something about the urge to find “Real people” to collaborate with shows just how fake this idea is. They fetishize the idea that everyone is an artist. But don’t feel this collaborative art is real unless it uses non-artistic people as a sort of diversity hiring scheme. “We’re not phoney. Look at all the non art people we’ve hired!”

Surely if you’re just using members of a community you don’t belong to to make your art it’s not much different to a circus master claiming he and his animals and freaks are just one big happy family.

And art and life will never be blurred. Most people are not and do not want to be artists. This is the truth of the world. We need to respect that.This dream of a Téchntopia (Word society of artists. Don’t look it up, I just coined the term) is nothing but vanity from artists who can’t engage with the real world. People have been preaching the coming of the Téchntopia for about a hundred years now. If it was going to happen then it would have happened by now.

 

Can I just point out that modern art doesn’t matter? Like at all. No-one who isn’t already a superfan of postmodern art knows or cares about your “dematerialised, antimarket, politically engaged projects”. Australian Christian death metal bands have more impact on the world than this stuff does. So why am I being asked to treat this with such awe and respect.

I hate using irrelevance as an insult because it’s small minded. It suggests something only has value if it’s popular. But considering Bishop later describes painting and sculpture as irrelevant I feel justified here.

This, and indeed most modern art is totally irrelevant to the world at large. But it is always setting itself up as a messiah. That would be bad enough on it’s own. But the vanity and nepotism make it all the worse.

Why should I respect these people?

 

I’m going to be honest. I’m reacting to the bits I actually got. I understand very little of what I was reading here.

 

So I didn’t like the required reading much? Was the rest of it any good?

 

Well the session on Friday was a drag. Most of what we were shown wasn’t real art. It had no artistic vision or merit. It was just “cute”. And I mean that in the worst way possible.

Some of it was just activism called art to make it trendier and to excuse a strong or effective message. The ultimate exercise in middle class slacktivism. Make yourself feel good about a cause and puff yourself up for being an artist without  having to go through the brutal grind and heartache of real activism. 

 

A lot of this, Like the police on horses one by Tania Bruguera or the sand dune one by Francis Alys, don’t have anything to do with the question of responsibilities at all. It’s just rich people doing things just because. Apart from having no artistic value it makes no real point. “Hey. If a lot of people shifted the sand on a sand dune the dune would be different shape. Hey. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had mounted police officers doing crowd-control in an art gallery and no-one knows it’s meant to be art”. These aren’t art pieces. They’re anecdotes. Silly stories to tell over dinner when you can’t think of anything meaningful to talk about. They’re neither moral or aesthetically pleasing. It’s just “A rich person did this and called it great art”.

The bit about Atur Zmijewski’s experiment with the choir of deaf children actually was fun and interesting to read about and could be good talking points on issues of perspective and disability. Repeated a few times we might even learn something scientific about music, deafness and singing. But I wouldn’t call it art. Just a neat experiment. Even most of the bits that feel like art, as opposed to non-art using activism and post-modernism as excuses, have no artistic value. It’s all “cute” at best. Appraised as art they are unremarkable and passe.

Peter Gabirel and many of the other rock stars of the 1980s were able to give us songs that were both strong works of activism and great works of music. Whether you think they were sincere or not  they did both effect change and make great art. But because they are not “real” artists they deserve less respect than the people shown here. Apprently…..

We were asked if this “Collaborative art” was practical or symbolic. It strikes me this stuff is never practical and always symbolic.

We were asked how should a work of art be evaluated? Almost always as art first and moral value second. A work would have to do an extraordinary amount of good or evil in the real world before it’s moral value should be considered more important than its artistic value. “All good intentions shouldn’t render art immune to critical analysis”.

 

I also feel the lecture itself had some intellectual dishonesty. The definition of responsibility given in the slideshow are surprisingly narrow and based on a certain point of view. Rightly or wrongly, not everyone sees improving social conditions and helping the environment as something people have.

 

Assuming art has to vitalise people to action instead of numbing them can be a dangerous idea. You can turn people away with your art. Like how Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s more liberal bent caused a large chunk of the fanbase to claim they were being preached at and form a boycott of the new Star Wars films. Or how the Family Guy episode ‘Screams in Silence’ has been heavily criticized for spreading misinformation about domestic abuse that could make things harder for people experiencing domestic abuse.

Just having a good cause in no-way guarantees a good product. You can end up hurting your own cause.

Also. It’s not proven that just because a work is numbing that it is bad. I’ve heard the defence that we need a degree of numbing to get by.

Art can be both therapeutic or/and confrontational. There is room for both.

 

All this posturing does is instead of making the world better is make art worse. It lets people make bad art, or bad non-art, and feel good about it because they’re “Helping”

 

I’m Bored.

What does the world look like? Other thoughts

Okay. My first attempt at marking a journal on this topic didn’t go so well. I hated the first piece of reading given here so much I had to post a rant about it. With that done, let’s look at the rest of it. 

 

Sadly I was not done with Hito Steyerl. I had to watch her short film “How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File”.

I hated it. It was Audio tourture (Sans using “When Will I See You Again” by Three Degrees and the end. That a great song and they deserved better than to be in this) And I didn’t care to try to interpret it. But it was still not as bad as ‘In Free Fall’. Other than that there’s nothing I want to say about it.  

 

I also had to see a 7 minute short about Clive Head talking about his painting Leicester Square.

It’s neat. I don’t really have anything to say except he seems like a cool guy and he does good work.

 

With that done. Let me respond to the ideas presented as a whole.

 

There are multiple valid perspectives (Both literal and figurative. But I’m talking literally here) They don’t cancel each other out. Though some can be more valid than others. If one could see all possible perspectives at once, have a God’s eye or omniscient perspective you would have the most valid perspective of all. 

So I don’t agree with the idea that all outlooks are equally valid. Nor the idea that you can just dismiss ones you don’t like. Though notice a lot of people hold both beliefs at the same time. Postmodernism means everyone is entitled to the postmodernists opinions.

I think said people are overstating how different perspective and real vision actually are. It’s fun to shit on an old paradigm even if it’s not an invalid one. It is a paramount tool in drawing and always will be.

 

I think the same thing can be said about the question of realism. Yes realism can be a real thing. And there are more ways than one in which something can be realistic. Lots of ways in fact. But you can grade realism on levels. Watership Down is clearly more realistic than Bugs Bunny.

Different things can be realistic in different ways. And yes realism can often, even frequently, become a parody of itself if often repeated. See how depictions of  Medieval Europe have gone from actknowleging that people didn’t live the most hygienic lifestyle to making everyone an inbreed moron covered from head to toe in shit. But the idea does still have merit.

 

 

On of the big ideas that is used against the idea of realism or a scale of things being more or less realistic is Schema theory. The idea we can only recognise something due to previous reference. We need a schema or we either draw a blank or see the thing wrong. Or even the wrong thing.

 

I do think schema has value. But I don’t think it ends the idea that something can be realistic.

Schema is experience. Experience is what gives us reference.Fiction can also be schema. But that does not invalidate the truth of lived experience.

Lighting and texture always look real to us, regardless of culture, as they are the tenants upon which vision is built. Light is a universal schema. We always recognise natural light vs studio light when watching a film. No-one has ever said movies with natural lighting look less realistic than old films shot on sound-stages.

 

There are other universal schemas too. We do recognise realistic motion or a good representation of it even if we don’t know that we do. Just like how we can recognise someone by their walk even if we’ve never taken time to pay attention to how they walk.

This why animation works. You know if a character is moving, talking, and acting like a real person even if You’ve never analysed how these things look in your life. You don’t even know your reaction positively to good animation. You just do. Even a small child can feel the the animation in Disney’s Aladdin is more realistic than the 60s Spiderman show even though many of them they could never say why.

 

There is a limit to have far you can take it. At least if you aren’t super talented. But it does work.

 

Still. I have to ask. What does this have to do with the questions of what is contemporary art?

This feels like diversion.

In Free Fall by Hito Steyerl is Trash.

“Imagine you are falling, but there’s no ground” No thanks. That sounds cold.

 

For my second week had to write a journal on the theme “What does the world look like?”.

The first piece of reading we were given to read was piece by a Japanese-German woman named Hito Steyerl. Normally I’d put my thoughts on this journal into my response to the subject as a whole. But this is one of the things I’ve ever read. To lump it in with everything else we’ll be looking at would be to do the other speakers a disservice. 

Let’s get this garbage out of the way now.

 

 

We begin with an untitled introduction about being in freefall and how it undoes our understanding of the world. Our senses. Our subject/object relationships. And the way we see things. It reads like ammatur mysticism. But seems harmless enough.

I just want to point out the changes experienced in freefall have probably less to do with the loss of social paradigms or new ways of seeing being open up than the fact

it’s more than our extra senses like equilibrioception and proprioception aren’t used to this kind of feedback and so much of it.

It’s dizziness. Not enlightenment.

 

So far it’s not too bad. But the pain has only just begun.

 

We move into Part One: A brief History of the Horizon. And the cracks start appearing

 

“First, let’s take a step back and consider the crucial role of the horizon in all of this. Our traditional sense of orientation—and, with it, modern concepts of time and space—are based on a stable line: the horizon line. Its stability hinges on the stability of an observer, who is thought to be located on a ground of sorts, a shoreline, a boat—a ground that can be imagined as stable, even if in fact it is not”.

I hate this smug way we have at looking at the past. “Look at this 16th century sailors with their sextants and spy glasses. So primitive. Relying on things like the horrorzenline and the sun on the stars for their world view!”

These people were smarter than any of you. They reinvented the world and often risked their lives doing so. How dare people from the past rely on a paradigm that was utterly groundbreaking at the time. Urgh!

But so far this is unremarkable for a 21st century writer. But it doesn’t take long for things to become extreme.

 

Then the attack on western culture becomes explicate. “The use of the horizon to calculate position gave seafarers a sense of orientation, thus also enabling colonialism and the spread of a capitalist global market, but also became an important tool for the construction of the optical paradigms that came to define modernity, the most important paradigm being that of so-called linear perspective”. Steyerl is talking about the sextant and perspective like they were evil magic made by a laughing dark lord Sauron thinking about how many people the orcs will kill with them.

Considering Hito Steyerl is of Japanese decent, a people bent on conquest of of nations and religious based genocide durinf the 15th and 16th centuries and have embraced captailism harder than most european nations I don’t think she should throw stones about how evil western socity was. Hers were and are doing fine on their own.

As a consequence, linear perspective not only transforms space, but also introduces the notion of a linear time, which allows mathematical prediction and, with it, linear progress.

We had the concept of linear time long before perspective! Augustine anyone!

 

“the spectator’s importance is also undermined by the assumption that vision follows scientific laws. While empowering the subject by placing it at the center of vision, linear perspective also undermines the viewer’s individuality by subjecting it to supposedly objective laws of representation”.

No, no, no, no, no, no! This woman has a PhD in Philosophy? I have to wonder how she got it. I don’t even know where to start. If she hates perspective this much may I suggest she go live on south sea island where she can live among people who never invented it. One may as well say the language is disempowering because you have to use the words other people invented. Or claim books disempower people because they are written from the point of view of the author and we are “oppressed” into seeing their worldview.

Perspective does not disempower people. It is a system that replicates vision in a two dimensional space. It only disempowers you if you think you can see the world in cubist vision if you’re just raised to do so.

And vision DOES follow scientific laws. Even people who consider themselves real world magic users wouldn’t deny this point. 

 

Needless to say, this reinvention of the subject, time, and space was an additional toolkit for enabling Western dominance, and the dominance of its concepts”.

Hito Steyerl was raised Germany. Has western society been that cruel to her that she see any advancements it makes as just being a scheme to take over the world?

Does she know down history more advanced civilizations have always oppressed less advanced ones? When the Mongols invented a system of warfare than any other nation in the world they didn’t use it to invite people to tennis matches. The Aztec and Mayan empires didn’t use their greater science and economics give all the neighbouring nations hugs.

 

All of these components are evident in Uccello’s six-panel painting, Miracle of the Desecrated Host (1465-69)… [] The date of these panels shortly prefigures the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492, also the year of Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the West Indies. In these paintings, linear perspective becomes a matrix for racial and religious propaganda, and related atrocities. This so-called scientific worldview helped set standards for marking people as other, thus legitimizing their conquest or the domination over them.

You do release the racial and religious propaganda would still exist without perspective? It’s not like these things didn’t exist before. Rome excelled in using it’s writers to jusify racial and political genocide.

And again. Claiming that the most scientifically advanced nations in the world at the time were unscientific because she doesn’t like them.

 

In the second part titled “The Downfall of Perspective”  she starts by siting The Slave Ship by J. M. W. Turner. Turner did use perspective. If you told him he didn’t he’d throw his arms up in dispair.

 

At this point I had the horrible suspicion that Steyerl’s “More scientific ways of seeing” are just infact less literal ways of painting.

And as we move into Part 3: Acceleration, she invokes montage in film. I was correct.

 

“Painting abandons representation to a large extent and demolishes linear perspective in cubism, collage, and different types of abstraction. Time and space are reimagined through quantum physics and the theory of relativity”.

Quantum theory and Relativity do not end the concept of linear time. They show on macro level time is not linear, But they do not change how life is lived or experienced. Testament for this can be found in Watchmen by Alan Moore. Doctor Manhattan doesn’t experience time in a linear fashion. But he is obliged to act as if he does by fate because Moore does not have the capacity to show how living all of your life at once would change your behavior if you had free will. The fact that all our phones have clocks shows that Linear time is far from dead.

 

Her argument that because we can look down in outer space or freefall end the tyranny of perspective is also bunk. We have three-point perspective to show such extremities. And that that photographs taken in these situations and they still follow three point perspective shows the theory is scientific and grounded in reality.

 

She also invokes 3D cinema. 1: 3D films still use perspective. 2: I now have to question her taste in movies.

 

As we move into Part 4: Free Fall, my will to live starts to leave me.

“ …many of the aerial views, 3D nose-dives, Google Maps, and surveillance panoramas do not actually portray a stable ground. Instead, they create a supposition that it exists in the first place”.

Ground does exist woman! What do you think you walk on?

 

In this chapter she double down on her belief that the simple act of looking on it’s own kills the merit of linear perspective. This article opened with Hans Vredeman de Vries, plate in Perspective. A plate showing the view looking down from courtyard. This was made in 1604. Just because we can now look down from greater heights doesn’t change how we are perceiving the world.

 

Why do so many people in these types of journals view subject to object relationships as the worst thing ever? Maybe it’s not a bad thing that we aren’t squashed into happy little ball like in the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Maybe us having our own identity is a good thing.

 

In Part 5 The Politics of Verticality we get so bogged down in philosophical-political jargon that I can’t understand her anymore. Assuming I ever did. And most of the parts I do understand I’m too tired to argue against.

 

I just want to point out that even in space pictures still have horizon lines. They’re just invisible.

Even using things like fish-eye lenses  or multi-screens in film can only bend perspective. Not break it and we will always return proper cinema because coherent storytelling beats out visual gimmicks every time. Just as classical illustration still endures while abstract art has been abandoned by the art world for not being pure enough.

 

And even taking Steyerl’s word as gospel. That perfective IS dead. Has it ended tyranny, bigotry, and exploitation? No it hasn’t! Her ideas are worthless.

 

 

I suspect a lot of what has been said by Steyerl as going to be defended as metaphor. Is It? I don’t know. I doubt she’d complain if anyone took her literally and thought she was right. I need to get this done quickly and I’m not going waste time looking for some deeper meaning that might not even be there to this nonsense.

Here is a link to the original article if you want to read it. But I don’t recommend it. This was painful to read.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/#_ftnref1

 

Fuck!

Constellation year 2: Why even bother?

I was meant to have this journal up two weeks ago. But they never make these things easy

 

“Art is Dead. Art remains dead. And we have killed it” (paraphrase of some German guy. The Gay Science. 1882. Page 125)

Yes, I used that joke last year. But I’m using it again. It feels even more relevant now.

Also. Where is the point?

 

Remember back in English class when, if you had a good teacher, they would not only give you a text, would ask you to think about a certain theme or element in the text, but ask you to say if how those ideas were done or if they were well done or not? Oh I miss those days.

I have not one, but five texts and a slideshow to react to and no guidance at all on what I am supposed to say about them. Given all of these are deeply rooted in art theory and a lot of them cross over into philosophy i can’t react to every point in these texts. It would take me a year.

Let’s go back to why I was given these texts to begin with.

 

The question we we’re given two weeks ago was “what is contemporary art and as a whole, what does it mean to be contemporary?” 

Two me the answer seems painfully simple. Was it made in the past 10 years? The unit of measurement by which we measure our lives and divide up our centuries evenly? If not then it is far enough away from the present to not be contemporary. But it wouldn’t be the modern art world if we could do anything simply would it? No sooner had I put out my theory than two other students spoke up. One posseting that even art 100 years old can be contempory if it hasn’t aged and is still in the dominant style. Using duchamp’s infuriating urinal as an example because that thing will never leave me alone. The other stating contemporary art is defined by dealing with contemporary issues. Apparently I will never be a contemporary artist as I will never dabble in readdymade or conceptual nonsense or talk about modern issues. The fact that I am alive now cannot help me.

Well, as the texts I’ve been given give credence to everything but the idea that contemporary art can be measured by when it was made (Simple explanations can’t be spun into money-making lectures and books) I guess I’m going to have to at least look at these other ideas.

 

Never have I read so much but gained or understood so little. Not just in terms of understanding the text. But in the questions of “What point is being made here? Why does this matter? How am I supposed to react to this?

I’ve hated theories of art before but here there’s nothing solid enough to latch onto for me to hate. I know I don’t agree with this stuff. But I can’t even say why I don’t agree beyond my above stated belief that contemporary art is measured by time. All I can do is shrug my shoulders at these intellectuals and say “Yes. That certainly is a thing you believe”. I feel like I’m being asked to critique a fanfiction of an anime I’ve never watched for if it’s faithful to the source text.

 

The first one I had to read was a german philosopher called Boris Groys. Reading him was hard. I think he means well. But I was reminded of a bad-faith debating tactic I’ve heard of, throw lots of questions of statements at an opponent all at once so they can’t counter every one of your points and hopefully get lost or scared.

 

I found Groys idea of wasted time, that it can have more value than a lasting end product, not only terrifying and depressing. But antithetical to what I am being taught here in Cardiff. If I waste all my time here and don’t come up with a good journal and artwork to submit the time just spent struggling wont have existential value,

And his theories about repetitive time were pretty lackluster as well. We live in linear time. We are born. We die. Trying to find meaning in art that shows time  like a seesaw is hiding from the truth of our lives.

Granted I could easily have misunderstood both points. Reading this numbed my brain.

 

Also You CAN view video art as a whole. I like to just sit down in museum and go through the whole thing. I know you don’t HAVE to but i do find it rewarding. Most video pieces do make good atmospheric non-narrative short films.  

 

Next on the list was Mark Godfrey. He was the hardest to get through. His work needed more line breaks and paragraphs.

 

A lot of the points he made felt tired and overdone for me. 

Like complaining we are too western in our understanding of art history. It is fine for western people to critique art history through a westen lense! People in eastern cultures do the same. Many cultures don’t even have the concept of fine art as we understand it. You don’t know what you don’t know. Trying to expand our concept of the history of western art onto the whole world isn’t being progress. It’s vanity. It’s saying these other cultures fit nicely in our box. Be honest about what you understand and don’t criticize others for not following creed you could never keep yourself.

It’s fine when talking about art to talk about western art. Because that’s what you fell in love with to begin with. It’s fine to value your own culture.

 

Another tired point was the supposed irrelevance of museums and what a victory this is for artists. The fact that some more modern works of art require a specific setting or are too large to be put in a museum does not invalidate museums as a whole. 

Not unless you consider all modern painting a sculpture worthless. Which i do not. In fact, modern, non-meseumable art can often be quite worthless in it’s own right. Don’t praise an artist for breaking a paradigm if by breaking it he makes something worse. 

 

On a more original point, Godfrey also wonders why modern fine artists are less keen to embrace new technologies than their early to mid 20th century counterparts.To which I answer could it be simply newer technology is less conducive to fine art than it was in the 1920s? Anyone can make digital art and show it on the internet. It makes one very unspecial to do so.

And sadly these days most modern fine art is 99% showmanship. You need to make a big flashy statement like covering an island in canvas or fucking a dead pig live on stage. Making a detailed, nuanced and heartfelt digital painting doesn’t catch eyeballs the way painting yourself green and singing the USSR national anthem will. Digital technologies make us anonymous. Great for trolls. Not so great if you want the Turner prize.

I myself have often tried to compensate for lack of talent with size and spectacle. But I do at least try to make my things pleasing to the eye.

 

After that cam Kelly Baum. Hers was the longest. But not as hard to read.

 

Though she also broachuched some points I’ve grown tired of. 

She did talk a fair bit about viewing art through socio-political lenses. I hate the need to see art as political activism. Yes art and politics often go hand in hand. But putting so much focus on it turns art from an expression into a civic duty. Cold and without the freedom to focus on things other than politics

 

She also really liked name-dropping people I haven’t heard of and sounded like she expected me to be impressed.

 

She talked a lot about the heterogeneity (a word I had to look up) of modern art and wondered why it is so. Why gut response is if it is so diverse (I’m dubious on that point) I’d say it’s because we have way more people now and proportionately more of them are doing art.

 

Suzanne Hudson didn’t say much I wanted to react to

 

Isabelle Graw did have some interesting points put I’m folding them into my final reaction.

 

She did however repete a falsehood that 20th and 21st century artist keep telling themselves that I have not only grown sick of, but I’ve started to hate. The idea that in the future all people will be artists or that all people WANT to be artists. 

Why do so many artists think everyone wants to be a creative? No. They. Don’t! Talk to a taxi driver or a football fan or an animal lover just once. There are people out there who never even think about art! Talk about narcissism

 

But I agree with the bit where she says art has had a lot of expectations that it can’t live up to placed on it. In fact I think she doesn’t know how true that is. Art can’t save the world or BE the world. The world is too big and too diverse. Not ethnically diverse. But too diverse in terms of people’s needs, loves, and lifestyles.

 

Now with that done I’ve put together the broadest points I could respond to. A collective ethos from all five that I think I can respond to

 

Final response. 

 

I think modern art is stuck in an existential crisis it doesn’t need to be in. And these people are not helping. As I said above. Having a huge debate as to what makes contemporary art can be very profitable. But it’s unfair to just dismiss these statements as money making schemes. But why does all this hand wringing about what is contemporary feel so hollow?

 

Well lets go back to that fucking urinal. You know that joke everyone has seen about modern art all being pretentious rubbish? Well ever notice how the joke doesn’t change? That’s because art hasn’t changed in decades.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Without historical context Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and Conceptualism do kinda blur together. I know making art that is truly contemporary to the moment is hard. Being scientific any moment is infinitely indivisible. So scientifically it’s impossible. But you can be in the experiencial movement. That moment lasts as long as you perceive it to.William Blake saw eternity in a grain of sand. And time does fly when your having fun. But there’s probably science that says how much we can perceive at a time. And thus how much time it takes to have a moment of perception. That moment is too small to make a work of art in. So Is contemporary art doomed to non-existence? No. It’s cool. If it’s recent enough it’s contemporary. But right now we’re not even trying to make contemporary art. We’re making old art over and over again. The quest for “truly contemporary” art is keeping us locked in the past.

 

All the people mentioned talked about the promising future in which art is all things and everyone is an artist that postmodernism will bring. People have been promising this for decades. Enough! Make something worthwhile now!

Mark Godfrey talks about how Modernism was all full of promises of a utopian future we have developed nostalgia for. I see no nostalgia for modernism. Just hate and spite. And hypocrisy given postmodernism has been making the same empty promise for ages. 

 

And some of those promises aren’t even worth fulfilling. Some people talk about tearing down the binary between art and viewer. Please stop trying to tear down my identity as a person separate from your crappy art.

 

I feel like the quest we’ve been given here to define truly contemporary art is just a distraction. An intellectual cul de sac. Every instinct is just telling me this is just a dressed up version of the quest for “pure” art I was made to look at last year. It could be that I’m just not getting it and too tied up in my worldview to see the difference in the questions and why it matters. But I can only respond through this lens. I’m sorry if I’m being lazy and not really answering the question. But bare with me.

 

Isabelle Graw is very keen on separating art from the art business. There seems to be this great desire, and nor just from her, to cleans Capital A Art of capitalism. Or at least the auction house. Whether you sympathise with this goal or not, the fact is it can’t be done. If you make a site specific piece people will charge for the right to see it. If you “make” a found object piece people will put all their stock into the object rather than the thing it stands for, Duchamp’s Urinal might be supposedly all concept. But if a vandal smashed that urinal people would be upset. And even hard core conceptionalists would demand it be replaced because the idea is not strong enough to stand on its own.

And if you make a purely conceptual piece people will still make mercendizable books on the subject.

If you really want to be truly free of money in art, become a hobbyist. Earn you money somewhere else and make art out of passion. You can’t say you should just get money for being an artist and your work be in no way monetizable.

Instead of trying to make the purest art possible you should just focus on making good art.

This dislike of the auction house seems to tie into the aforementioned dislike of museums. Graw says “Lost from view is the fact that the art world is a highly elitist milieu that operates by means not only of inclusion but also exclusion”.

I’ve covered at length how conceptionalism works entirely off nepotism and has nothing to do with quality. The art world is more elitist than ever. All that’s happened is maybe the gatekeepers have changed.

Baum say art no longer serves as an enclave or ghetto. I couldn’t agree less. It feels like the postmodern artists are demanding to be seen as gods. There own ghetto of beings who deserve money and fame for simply being. The issue with the auctioneers and the currioates isn’t that they make art worse. But that they take money and respect that belongs to the artists alone.

I feel like the tenets of modernism were never really disproven. Everyone just decided that postmodernism was true because they wanted it to be. It gave the artists more divine power.

 

Maybe this vision of divinity is part of why the quest for pure art burns so fiercely within the postmodern artist. But it’s not healthy, or even possible. Anymore than scientifically contemporary art is.

 

I’m made to think about The scenes from Richard Linkladder films Slacker and Waking Life involving The Man who records everything and The Holy Moment.

We’ll cover the Holy Moment later. The man who records everything has video cameras pointed everywhere at all times so he can review anything that happens to him. If he goes outside his home and loses an event he feels he lost and out of control. A perfect metaphor for the modern artist here.

On that note. Could we please drop this obsession with if art does/doesn’t should/shouldn’t point to art. It’s pointless! And it only damages art as a whole.

It reminds me of my own struggles with OCD.

 

I’ve made it clear I feel all modern art is the same. The medium has stagnated. The people in these journals don’t feel the same

They point to the heterogeneity of art as proof of the difficulty in deciding what contemporary art is. Maybe proof that is doing well or stuggling. Regardless if it is doing well or not. If art trulley is heterogeneous then it will be harder to document and categorize. The fact that modern art is difficult to categorize doesn’t mean it doesn’t fall into categories. As stated before. Sometimes trends only reveal themselves when they are over. And I do believe postmodern art will die. All things do

 

Let’s talk about the Holy Moment now.

The Richard Linkladder film Waking Life is about a man in a dream full of people trying to find existential meaning in their lives. At one point he walks into a cinema that is playing film called the Holy Moment. In a theorist states that if God is omnipresent then that must mean any photograph is a depiction of God. And thus film can act as a record of God. Through God we are connected to the past Linkladder has shown, and so in all film. If not all art.

As Boris Groys points out, for a good post modernist, God is dead. They can’t take comfort in connecting to the past or be part of any holy moment like the ones Linkladder claims to have recorded. Human beings cling to eternity. We need it. I don’t think postmodernism has transcended this need. Just transformed it into something toxic and egocentric. They try to turn themselves into gods. Something eternal in spirit if not it truth. But like I said. This is hiding from the truth of our existence.

 

On the other hand Mark Godfrey suggests we are now more entangled in the past. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

The Rhizome model of time is never going to take off. It’s decent for describing memory, But it has nothing to do with how we actually perceive time.

Anyone who Feels ambivalent about being “in one’s time” or being at home in one’s time doesn’t know Jack. Most people rarely look beyond their own little bubble of their own little life. And those that do feel very cut off from the past they’re looking at. We are stuck in time. This is our blessing and our curse. But if Linkladder is right. We do have a connection to our past. And all this posturing is for nothing.

 

We don’t make contemporary art by transcending time. We make art and being human makes us transcendent.

 

My drawing teacher once told me that if you’re not making art you’re not an artist. And I think that is all you need. Make good art. And the universe will do the contemporary bit for you. Trying to be pure, or contemporary will just drag you into the past because it’s an old dogma. One that needs to die.

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