Rank—Art and Artist (iia)—The Inessentiality of Biography (a)

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

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[xxii] during all the years when I was constantly absorbed by problems, particularly those connected with poetry, I did not attempt a single biography (or pathography) of a famous artist.

...anything in the nature of psychographic material and view-points that I myself had to contribute invariably presented itself to me at once as something fitting into a larger frame,...

...I propose to follow the line of reaching out beyond what is individual in the artist-personality and to show, or at least suggest, the collective aspect...

...my feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally, originate solely in the constructive harmonising of this fundamental dualism of all life. I arrived at this conception by a concentrated psychological study of the two human types which most clearly reveal success and failure in this struggle to overcome: the so-called neurotic type, and the creative.

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[22] it is just these ultimate psychological problems of art that will trip us up if we have neglected or inadequately understood the creative personality, an understanding that is an inherent necessity in all æsthetic, however far it may advance into the domain of psychology.

For
æsthetic, by its nature, can only deal with the effect of a work of art, and it takes account of its creation by an artist only by arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator.

But this conclusion, apart from its indirect nature, is a fallacy; for as we (or at least as I, myself) have been convinced by a study of the productive personality, there is between that and the unproductive type not only a quantitative but a qualitative difference.

...it seems to me clear that the idea of intuition (Einfühlung) as fashioned by psychological æsthetic has been attained as from a view-point of reception, while the notion of abstraction which Worringer contrasts with it refers rather to the spiritual attitude of the creative artist. ...

Ever since Aristotle's day this seems to me to have begun with the tacit assumption that the artist intended to present the effect he aimed at in its phenomenal form, and that therefore there were involved in the creation, at least potentially, the same psychological experiences and psychical

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processes as are to be observed in the contemplator of the work and especially in the æsthetic critic.

... [of course] in some cases the artist does aim at a definite idea effect in his work,... Nor need we doubt that the artist occasionally does find pleasure and satisfaction in his creation, though the confessions of great artists themselves generally tell rather of the struggle and suffering of creating it.

But the fundamental difference in essence between the creative and the receptive types, which are psychologically complementary, is not affected by such evidences. While æsthetic pleasure, whether in the creator or in the contemplator, is ultimately a renunciation of self, the essence of the creative impulse is the exactly opposite tendency towards assertion of self.

Rank—Art and Artist (i)The Autonomy of the Spiritual

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

...

[xiii] the human urge to create does not find expression in works of art alone; it also produces religion and mythology and the social institutions corresponding to these. In a word, it produces the whole culture of which the works of art in a particular style-epoch have to be regarded as one of the expression-forms. We shall therefore avoid, as far as may be, the attempt to "explain" completely any one of these expression-forms in terms of another one, and shall rather consider all the expression-forms of human culture, however various, first in relation to their origins in the creative impulse, and thereafter in respect of their reciprocal action.

Here is one good reason to treat The Arts as a unit: despite their technical diversity, they share a common psychological origin in the human urge to create .

In the direction of transmission this is origin marks a point of "divergence" beyond which discipline-specific factors are operable.

In the direction of reception it is a point of "convergence" beyond which diverse artworks (and who knows what other cultural artifacts; e.g. religion , mythology , social institutions ) can be grouped together.

Paul Goodman—What is a picture?

Paul Goodman
Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals
(1962)

"What is a picture?"
(pp. 182-190)

[185] A strong sculpture controls its surrounding space and draws us into it; therefore our space is made continuous with the art-work's, there is only special space. Consider a contrast. Imagine a frame around the Apollo Belvedere and it easily turns into a picture... But imagine a frame around the Moses and you at once get colossal Dada. Going further, imagine a frame around the Captives, not yet free of the rock, and the effect is abhorrent. ...

I take it that this was Jackson Pollock's idea, to control our space and make only one special space, when he said that the onlooker was supposed to be entangled in his big canvases, as in a woods. Not dissimilarly, Rothko's big colored stripes have been called backgrounds that make the people look good; the onlookers have entered a special space and actually are in the picture.

A colored wall limits our continuous space rather than itself being limited, so we do not see it as a picture; but when it is painted with figures, like a mural, it is often a matter of choice whether or not it is a picture. The more architectural, the less pictorial.

...

[187] The fresco fury of Michelangelo is even his outstanding painterly quality... In the past, however, this painting-action was mostly used to underscore such picture properties as appropriateness to the subject, atmosphere, composition, decoration. It has been the genius of our times to isolate painting-action as sometimes sufficient to itself. Such pure gesture sophisticatedly recalls the painting of children or aboriginal petroglyphs ,

Ugh.

in what fascinates us is not the painted product but the transmitted action, the sense of the painter painting.

Our man here finds said transmitted action to be recall ed by said pure gesture . Being initiated, we can propose no remedy. But if a non-initiate found, conversely, that the painting merely recall ed a painting and not an action, we would like to know what (if any) remedy he might propose thereby.

I do not think that such action organizes a special space in any of the ways we have been discussing.

HOORAY!

There is no illusory space and no composition of flat surface. Therefore there is nothing to frame.

WHOOT!

Further, putting a rectangular frame around the action creates wrong assumptions and confuses the direct meaning of the gesture.

Well, I think it depends on who's looking.

Consider, for instance, a real girl skipping down the street or a young chap making a neat double play at second base in a ball game. These are lovely gestures, but to frame them is to kill them: it turns them into cinematographs and destroys their continuity with our space and life.

But perhaps a painting-action might be compared to a dramatic action on a stage,

This is a drama-free zone.

in its specially lit special space framed by the proscenium arch. It seems to me this is a poor analogy.

Agreed.

The proscenium-framed space is much weaker in esthetic texture than the words, acting, and blocking of the drama;

Thank God.

it is easily unattended to; we look past the arch. In a painting, however, the negative rectangle surrounding the painting-action is of almost equal textural value with the painted

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marks;

I find this assertion rather bizarre.

it is colored like them, and extended like them. Therefore it either must be attended to, making a conventional composition, a picture; or it is a dead weight on the action, like an obtrusive set in a play.

The same reasoning holds against those painters who claim that the rectangular canvas is the playground for their action, like the football field for the game. It is again a poor analogy. The spectators of the game do not importantly notice that the grass at the fifty-yard line is worn thin and that the corners want cutting, but the spectators of a painting notice the texture, color, and painted or unpainted quality of the background.

The distinctiveness of certain hallowed stadiums and grounds is actually a huge part of the appeal of sports, whereas certain dimensions, rules, and (occasionally) customs are held constant. For the "true fan" this diversity-within-unity is absolutely a conscious part of the experience. You know when you are looking at Fenway Park, Lambeau Field, or Pebble Beach.

Also, the spectators of the football game know that, by the rules, the game may at any moment spring into any unoccupied territory, so that the whole field is necessary for the game and is potentially alive; whereas a painting gesture is already achieved and much of the rectangle has become dead past.

Is he serious?

When we say that a girl is "pretty as a picture," we mean

We'd really like to get with her but could do without the high-maintenance shenanigans?

that she makes the place of her presence and of her movements divinely special. ...

We speak of the space of the object in the picture, but of the place of the gesture in the world.

Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)

[239] The young people have latched on to the movement in art that is strongest in our generation, the so-called Action Painting or New York School. ... I have tried to show that this disposition to go back to the material elements and the real situation, is intrinsic and spontaneous in the art action and poetry action of some of the young groups. This means that they are not off the main track. It can be said that this Action art lacks content, it does not carry enough humanity. I think this is true. But it is just its eschewing of a stereotyped or corrupt content while nevertheless affirming the incorruptible content of the artist's own action, that is its starved and brave humanity—a step beyond the nihilism of Dada—a beginning.

Paul Goodman—The Beats

Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)

[65] Despite having minority traditions of their own, our present poor are absolute sheep and suckers for the popular culture which they cannot afford,... Indeed, it is likely that the popular culture is aimed somewhat at them,......in these circumstances it is immensely admirable that the Beat Generation has contrived a pattern of culture that, turning against the standard culture, costs very little and gives livelier satisfaction. It is a culture communally shared, in small groups. Much of it is handmade, not canned. Some of it is communally improvised. We shall speak later about the limitations of this procedure and the weakness of its products; but the fact of it, of a culture that is communal

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and tending toward the creative, is so capital that it must have a future, and it is worth while to study its grounding and economy.

...

[67] ...the writers on the Beat Generation are confused. For one thing, they have a false notion that the kind of artistic activity that proliferates among the Beats is art, and gives the justification of art as a vocation. It is not art but something else, and they do not behave as if they were justified by it.

[177] It is both an advantage and a disadvantage for an artist to have around him an intensely creative gang of friends who are not rival artists. They provide him an immediate audience that helps assuage the sufferings of art loneliness and art guilt. On the other hand, it is a somewhat sickening audience because it has no objective cultural standard, it is not in the stream of ancient and international tradition. So its exclamations, "It's the greatest!" or, "Go, man, go!" don't give much security. The artist finds that he is a parochial group hero, when the reassurance that he needs, if he is diffident, is that he is a culture hero for the immortal world. ...

[e.g.] An incident at a party for Patchen. Patchen is a poet of the "previous" generation, of long-proven integrity, with an immense body of work, some of which is obviously good, and the importance of the whole of it (may much

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still be added!) not yet clear. The point for our anecdote is that Patchen has the respect of writers but has received no public acclaim, no money, no easy publication. Now at this party, one of the best of the "Beat" writers, a genuine young artist, came demanding that the older poet give some recognition to the tribe of Beat poets, to "give them a chance." This was ironical since, riding on the Madison Avenue notoreity that we have mentioned, they had all got far more public acclaim, invitations to universities, night-club readings, than all of us put together. But Patchen asked for the names. The Beat spokesman reeled off twenty, and Patchen unerringly pointed out the two who were worth while. This threw the younger poet into a passion, for he needed, evidently, to win artistic recognition also for his parochial audience, among whom he was a hero, in order to reassure himself that he was a poet, which he was and as Patchen would at once have said. So he insulted the older man. Patchen rose to his height, called him a young punk, and left. The young man was crushed, burst into tears (he was drunk), and also left. At this, a young woman who often accompanied him, came up to me and clutched me by the knees, pleading with me to help him grow up, for nobody, she said, paid him any attention.

That is, the Beat audience, having resigned, is not in the world; yet being an eager creative audience, it wins the love and loyalty of its poet who becomes its hero and spokesman. But he too, then, doubts that he is in the world and has a vocation. As a Beat spokesman he receives notoreity and the chance of the wide public that every poet wants and needs; but he cannot help feeling that he is getting it as a pawn of the organized system.

Here is a simpler illustration of the relation of the spokesman-artist to the objective culture. This fellow is a much weaker poet, more nearly Beat himself, and quite

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conceited. At a reading of some other poet who is not a Beat spokesman, he tries to stop the reading by shouting "Don't listen to this crap! let's hear from X." His maneuver is to make the parochial the only existing culture; then, by definition, he himself is an artist.

And here is an illustration of the most elementary response. A Beat spokesman, not ungifted but probably too immature to accomplish much, gives a reading in a theater. During the intermission, he asks a rather formidable and respected critic what he thinks of a particular poem, and the critic says frankly that it's childish. At this the outraged poet, very drunk, stands in the lobby screaming "I hope you die! I hope art dies! I hope all artists die!"

These illustrations and the analysis of Beat conversation bring out the same point: In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race or what they can produce out of their own guts, it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial.

William Ittelson—Visual Perception of Markings

WIlLIAM H. ITTELSON
"Visual perception of markings"
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
1996.3(2),171-187

[178] Every photograph or precisely rendered perspective painting has a single optically correct viewpoint. However, we rarely look at pictures with our eye at precisely that point, as Leonardo suggested we should. What are the perceptual consequences of such incorrect viewpoints? Leonardo was definite: "It is impossible that your perspective should not look wrong, with every false relation and disagreement of proportion that can be imagined." Leonardo based this conclusion on what has come to be called variously the problem of inverse optics, of inverse perspective, or of inverse projection (Epstein, 1995). A word of definition: Given a real-world scene and a viewpoint, linear perspective asks, what is the proper perspective rendition on a given picture surface? This is a problem in geometry; it has been worked out in detail and provides a unique solution. Any change of the viewpoint entails a corresponding change in the perspective. The problem of inverse optics asks the opposite question: Given a viewpoint and a perspective rendition on a picture surface, what real-world scene is represented? As a problem in geometry this does not have a unique solution. An unlimited number of external configurations can give rise to the same perspective rendition. A unique geometric solution requires some additional constraining assumptions (e.g., rectangularity). However, granted the appropriate assumptions, a unique geometric solution can be reached, and that solution is sensitive to any changes in the perspective rendition due to changing viewpoints.

Perception of the real world seems to follow this pattern; it is immensely sensitive to changes in the perspective view. As we move about the world, our visual system receives constantly changing views that are woven together into the perception of a continuous and stable world. If changes in the perspective views are not consistent with a stable world, the world will appear to move and distort, as illustrated by Pozzo's ceiling and as shown, for example, in some ofthe "Ames demonstrations" (Ittelson, 1952) and the phenomenon of "illusory concomitant motion" (Peterson, 1986). If we look at pictures from any point except the optically correct viewpoint, the pictorial assumption coupled with inverse optics predicts the same effects. Leonardo's prediction should come to pass, but we all know that doesn't happen. We walk through museums and thumb through our photograph albums; everything looks fine

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even though our eyes are rarely, if ever, at the optically correct viewpoint. This apparent refusal of picture perception to follow the rules of inverse optics (Pirenne, 1970; Polanyi, 1970) has been labeled the robustness of perspective (Kubovy, 1986; Nicholls & Kennedy, 1993). This phenomenon poses a critical problem for the understanding of picture perception. Perceiving the real world is sensitive to small changes in perspective; perceiving pictures is seemingly indifferent to large changes.

My note says:
“Robustness of perspective” — a very useful term...and quite an elusive quality in musical presentation, what with performers having virtually no say in acoustics, technologists having equally little say in the devices listeners use to listen to recordings, etc. Vision being dominant, perhaps it is also more robust. At the same time, clearly visual artists also struggle with the environments in which their work is necessarily presented.

...

[184] At least three levels of intent underlie the creation of any marking: the immediate content, the medium used to express that content, and the general principle intended to be conveyed. While this is true of all markings, it is most easily demonstrated in art. The immediate content of, for example, Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d' Avignon" is 5 women. There is no doubt that Picasso intended to paint 5 women, and to perceive this painting as a picture of 5 women is certainly correct. But it is equally obvious that Picasso intended to do more than paint another picture of 5 women. He chose a particular medium, a constellation of design, form, color, paint, scale, and so forth, because he intended to evoke a particular affectance, a particular cognitive, affective, and imaginal state in the viewer. In all markings, the medium is, and always has been, at least part of the message. But underlying the choice of both content and medium is the intention to convey a general principle-in Picasso's case, a new way of looking at art and at human existence. This complex interweaving of levels of intent, so clearly illustrated in art, is characteristic of all markings although frequently hidden under a patina of accepted customs and usage. Even a graph in a scientific article is not immune. The immediate intent is to present a set of data, but the choice of how those data are presented-the medium used-is heavily dependent on what aspects of the data are intended to be emphasized, and that in tum grows out of what general principles and conclusions are intended to be drawn. The intent underlying any marking is a difficult and elusive quarry.

The creation and the subsequent perception of a marking involve a definite sequence of events: the creator of the marking starts with a set of intentions and produces a marking; the perceiver starts with the marking and tries to reconstruct the intentions. We need to examine this path in more detail. If there were a clear causal sequence, with intentions fully determining the marking and then being uniquely derivable from the marking, correct perception, in terms of recovering the original intent, would present no problem. There would always be, at least in principle, a correct solution. But that turns out not to be the case. Far from being a recognizable causal chain, the route from intention to marking and from marking back to intention is strewn with multiple choices and complex contingencies. This is also true of the creation and design of artifacts in general (Petroski, 1993), of which markings are a special case.

Markings, like all artifacts, start with an intention or purpose and end with a physical structure or form. If the process is successful, the form actualizes the intention so perfectly that it seems inevitable. Nevertheless, it is the product of a continuous series of choices based on social practices, individual experiences, and aesthetic judgments (Willats, 1990). The considerations impinging on and constraining future choices are contingent on earlier choices in a process that is as idiosyncratic and unique as the individuals involved. Many of the decisions along the way are "rational." They are in principle "computable" on the basis of some hypothetical algorithm. But some, perhaps most, are not. They are based on a feeling on the part of the creator of the marking that, of all possible paths, this one is the "right" way to go. This is most obvious in the case of the creative artist, but it is equally true for the creators of all types of markings. The number of potentially acceptable designs seems to be as countless as the number of possible sentences. Presenting quantitative information by diagrams offers an equally endless array of possibilities. "To envision information ... is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, art. ... And the standards of quality are those derived from visual principles that tell us how to put the right mark in the right place" (Tufte, 1990, p. 9). These decisions are properly termed aesthetic. "When is it finished?" is perhaps the most interesting decision of all and represents the final creative aesthetic judgment. No marking can be created without a continuing exercise of aesthetic judgments, although they may on occasion be so hidden in established practice as to be unrecognizable. And the thought, feeling, or image the marking is intended to communicate or express cannot be separated from the aesthetics of the marking.

Now another individual is faced with the marking. What is it? The most obvious solution is to derive from the physical form the original intent of the maker. The wonder of art is that it "evokes a corresponding resonance in the mind of the maker and the recipient" (Arnheim, 1993, p. 197). But this is rarely achieved. Between the original intent and the final markings are many possible "alternative histories," only one of which was followed and cannot in principle be retrieved from the marking alone. We can, of course, ask the creator of the marking, if available, what the marking is intended to mean. This may work in a few simple cases, but, in the general case, it runs into a curious paradox. This seemingly innocuous question asks the originator of the marking to produce a second marking that will elucidate the first. Will this marking be more easily understood than the original? Presumably not, or it would have been created in the first place. So we enter an endless regress. In most cases, perhaps fortunately, the originator is not accessible; in others, the original intent may be considered irrelevant, as with "found" art or religious icons used as decorative pieces. We can, as an alternative approach, ignore the original intent and assess the marking entirely within the nexus of contemporary social structure and practice. But this produces multiple answers, no one of which can be demonstrated to be uniquely correct. In actually dealing with markings, we inevitably combine both approaches. There is, in principle, no way of determining a single, stable answer to the correct perception of a marking.

Nevertheless, in dealing with markings, we do not experience anarchy; instead, we typically perceive a definite meaning that we are confident is correct. We can do this because the form or structure of the marking does provide powerful constraints on the meaning. These are

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the same constraints that guide the hand of the maker of the marking, and they have been listed earlier: (1) the inherent constraints on what makes a design decorative or aesthetically satisfactory, (2) the socially agreed upon meanings and usages surrounding writing, (3) the conventions regarding the construction of diagrams that are further constrained by the nonvisual data, and (4) the need for depictions of all kinds to have some formal relationship between the visual information provided by the world and that provided by the depiction. These constraints rarely lead us astray. Markings that have the form of a random array of lines rarely are intended to be designs. Markings that have the form Have gone to the store are rarely intended to mean Am in the kitchen cooking dinner. Markings that have the form of a street map are rarely intended to be abstract portraits or graphs of data. Markings that have the form of a cat are rarely intended to represent dogs. When we couple these constraints with equally powerful constraints imposed by current social usage, very little room may be left for multiple interpretations.

This process works; we generally deal successfully with the vast numbers of markings we daily encounter. But this is a pragmatic, not principled, solution to the problem of the correctness of the perception of markings, and it can be wrong. Suppose, for example, that someone puts a complex arrangement of lines and colors on a canvas and declares, "That is a nude descending a staircase." You and I and all our friends look at it and declare, strongly and unanimously, that, whatever else it may be, it most certainly is not a nude descending a staircase. But it turns out that we are wrong. Similarly, Have gone to the store may be intended to be read as I am angry with you and don't want to be home when you arrive. The perception of markings is a pragmatic affair enmeshed in a complex of individual, social, and cultural processes applied to the interpretation of forms that always underdetermine meanings.

Individual, social, and cultural meanings are in constant flux. So also are the perceptions of markings: witness the "Nude Descending a Staircase." The perception of markings is subject to both long-term and sudden, "catastrophic," changes. The perception of markings-or more generally, the perception of affectances-is divergent and open-ended. This is the dilemma, the challenge, and the opportunity facing us every time we create a marking. We construct a form, but we can never fully determine how that form will be perceived. Each perceiver can, and indeed must, perceive it idiosyncratically to a greater or lesser extent.

My note says:
“a pragmatic, not principled, solution” !!

[emailed to self, 18 May 2020]

Lasch—Theatrical Possibilites

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

[336]
The social conditions that generated the syndicalist explosion in Europe—the imposition of industrialism on economies still dominated by small workshops, a highly combustible mixture—had their nearest American equivalent in the West, where the traditions of the mining camp, the logging camp, and the bankhouse came face to face with corporate capitalism in its most ruthless, predatory form. The IWW was the direct descendant of the Western Federation of Miners, a union that ap-
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pealed to the same sense of manly independence and the same love of combat to which syndicalism appealed in France and Italy. Here too, workers experienced industrialism and the wage system not only as a decline in their standard of living but above all as a drastic infringement of their control of the workplace, of their very status as free men. The company towns that sprang up in the mining states seemed to make "wage slavery" a literal description of the new order, not just a rhetorical analogy. The company controlled not only the workplace but housing, credit, and all the other necessaries. The worker who could remember life as a prospector or cowboy now found that he owed his soul to the company store. He felt literally sold into slavery, and he embraced the philosophy of "direct action" as the only way out.

While social conditions in the West bore some resemblance to those created by the early stages of industrialism elsewhere, the cultural tradition that workers were trying to defend obviously differed from those that underlay European syndicalism. In the American West, the ideal of independence was associated not with the small proprietor's control over his household, his land or shop, and his tools but with the wandering life of the unattached male. It was not surprising that the IWW glorified the hobo, the drifter, the "nomadic worker of the West," in the words of its newspaper, Solidarity. The West was still a "man's country," according to Charles Ashleigh, an English radical who emigrated to the Pacific Northwest and became a "hobo and a Wobbly," like the hero of his novel, Rambling Kid. Ashleigh admired the "reckless rambling boys who despised the soft security and comfort of a dull city-paced existence." Ralph Chaplin, the Wobbly poet and songwriter, was attracted to the movement by its "glamorous courage and adventure," which he too associated with the West. Those who admired the Wobblies from a distance likewise emphasized its western origins. The Lawrence strike was a "western strike in the East," Lincoln Steffens wrote; "a strike conducted in New England by western miners, who have brought here the methods and the spirit employed by them in Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada.

European syndicalism was informed by an austere ethic of thrift and self-denial. In America, the syndicalist movement came to be associated with an ethic of self-expression and defiant irresponsibility—the new "paganism" of Greenwich Village. Literary intellectuals saw the Wobblies as cultural outcasts like themselves, free spirits, rebels against re-
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spectability. They sensed the affinity between their own ideal of the emancipated individual, unburdened by the cultural baggage of the past, and the hoboes and migratory workers glorified by the IWW. Having absorbed from modern literature an image of the "beauty of the essentially homeless and childless and migratory life," as Floyd Dell put it, they recognized the Wobblies as soul mates. "Anarchism and art," said Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review, "are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason." Hutchins Hapgood, the personification of the bohemian intellectual, called anarchism the fine art of the proletariat. He compared the Armory Show, which brought modern art to New York in 1913, to a "great fire, an earthquake, or a political revolution."

The Wobblies did not object to this assimilation of art and revolution. They too saw themselves as artists. "I have lived like an artist, and I shall die like an artist," said Joe Hill before his execution for murder. Bill Haywood allowed himself to be lionized by Mabel Dodge and other members of her famous salon. He regarded the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913—the fruit of his rapprochement between the IWW and Greenwich Village—as the high point of his career. Conceived by Mabel Dodge, the pageant was intended to dramatize the workers' exploitation by capitalism, but it exposed them to a more insidious kind of exploitation by turning radical politics into entertainment. "Life passed over insensibly into a certain, simple form of art," said Hapgood. ". . . That is the great thing about it, the almost unpredecented thing." Papers opposed to the IWW gave the pageant enthusiastic reviews: what was condemned as politics could be savored as theater. Both Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most flamboyant orator, had earlier turned down invitations to put themselves on the lecture circuit or stage. In her case, the offer came from no less an impressario than David Belasco, who could see the theatrical possibilities of revolutionary activism as clearly as John Reed. At the pageant, Reed led the Paterson strikers in a song he had written for the occasion, "The Haywood Thrill." Haywood thus resisted the lecture agents only to fall into the clutches of the avant-garde, leaving Flynn to wonder whether the distractions of the pageant had not contributed to the defeat of the strike itself.

John Berger—The Success and Failure of Picasso

John Berger
The Success and Failure of Picasso
(1965)

My note says:
p. 6—"the man, the personality, has put his art in the shade"
p. 9—"For Picasso, what he is is far more important than what he does."
p. 13—"Picasso's historical ambiguity...his fame rests upon his modernity... And yet in his attitude to art...there is a bias which is not in the least modern..."
It could not have been obvious in 1965 just how post-modern this outlook is, though in drawing a connection between the "what he is" outlook and Picasso's great fame JB clearly grasps the underlying mechanism. It is but a short step from the focus on self and the hostility to learning and reason and experimentation to the phenomenon of Famous for being Famous. The Picasso herein described would have made a near ideal instagram user...and instagram (the company and the user community) would have loved having him. The nineteenth- and twenty-first-century provenance of this ethos suggests a cyclical rather than linear history.

Elizabeth Cowling—Picasso

Elizabeth Cowling
Picasso: Style and Meaning
(2002)

[56] Like Matisse—but unlike many other innovative twentieth-century artists—Picasso never forgot, or wanted to forget, the achievements of the 'great masters' and he habitually made reference to them. ...his general approach perfectly fits Michael Baxendall's definition of the active, not passive, relationship which exists between a truly creative artist and the works of art which are his inspiration:

'Influence' is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who is the patient ... If one

[57]

says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality.

...

[95] Picasso's concentration on the sufferings of the dispossessed [ca. 1902] testifies to his identification with the workers' desperate struggle. But he was in no sense a political activist, and like most painters of his and his father's generation he was not prepared to put his art at the service of a political agenda, believing that painting should aspire to timelessness and that the appropriate forum for commenting on ephemeral socio-political events or expressing ideological convictions was the illustration, the cartoon and suchlike. Even artists like Picasso who were genuinely engagé made this fundamental distinction between painting and the graphic media. Assessing the relative importance of socio-political realities to the content of the Blue period work remains problematic because, having rejected naturalism, Picasso used an abstracted style as a way of universalizing or masking the strictly local and specific issues which may have provided his initial motivation.

...

[228]
The Lessons of the Artisan
In using popular codes of representation and imitating the typography of newspapers, posters, sheet music, and so on, Braque and Picasso signalled their intention to identify with nameless artisans rather than 'fine' artists. Throughout the Cubist years they lived in what were then cheap and unfashionable districts of Paris...where bohemian artists rubbed shoulders with the working classes. ... They took up boxing and affected the working man's uniform of overalls and canvas jacket. ...[as Kahnweiler once "reminisced":] They arrived, imitating labourers, turning their caps up in their hands: 'Boss, we've come for our pay!'

My note says:
Hipsters! Though it seems that ever fewer of today's hipsters are specifically "affecting" proletarianism. ...

Now:
Well, it might just be that I moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. The agro or lumbersexual of the Twin Cities was/is definitionally proletarian; not actually a lumberjack but certainly descended from one. And I suspect that more of the agros actually work for a living, in all kinds of jobs, whereas I find this ever harder to believe about most of the LA cohort with each passing year.

[336] For the three composers, for Cocteau, Massine, and Diaghilev himself, the discrepancies of style in Picasso's designs for Parade, and his virtuouso shifts between naturalism and Cubism in his easel paintings, were not anomalous: they were the norm, and
[337]
awakened in them no mistrust or incomprehension. All shared an essentially dramatic concept of the role of style, and all found the theater congenial because it required them to exercise their gift for composing in different voices and provided a focus for their commitment to the principle of change. In such company the question 'Which is the true Picasso?' did not arise. The contrast with the art world, where consistency was expected and inconsistency mistrusted and feared, could hardly have been greater.

an essentially dramatic concept of the role of style

After the heartwarming remark about stylistic inconsistency awakening no mistrust or incomprehension, this seemingly matter-of-fact observation is really not so flattering. What does essentially dramatic even mean? How can commitment to the principle of change be inherently a good (or bad) thing? It ought to depend on the change in question. And it certainly ought not depend on any old change merely to create dramatic-ness as an end in itself.

The later contemporary/millennial sense of drama seems apt as a corollary here. Perhaps millennial drama is actually a fair conjecture in Picasso's case (see J. Berger's book); but it's equally clear that he was simply a new kind of artist, and that even if he stands as exceptional in stature, the purported drama of his stylistic transitions would eventually become commonplace even among the mediocre, this owing not to anyone's mediocrity or greatness but to changes in the wider world. (Freed thus to reason transhistorically, Ligeti then becomes a much more logical comparison than Stravinsky, whose diversity of style either at any given time or viewed after the fact really was nowhere close either to Picasso's or to Ligeti's.)

[638] The fact that he had remained in Paris throughout the Occupation enhanced his reputation for defiance. But he was in his sixties and by the end of the decade it began to look as if he had been left standing by the rising avant-garde of abstract painters and sculptors. He remained stubbornly hostile to pure abstraction, which he sweepingly dismissed as undemanding, undramatic and, as he told Françoise Gilot, 'never subversive': 'It's always a kind of bag into which the viewer can throw anything he wants to get rid of. You can't impose your thought on people if there's no relation between your painting and their visual habits.'

Quite revealing, perfectly accurate, and meeting no objection whatsoever from these quarters. We're quite comfortable abdicating the imperative to impose, all the same in art as in life.

Lasch—Confession and Anticonfession

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[Subheading:]
Confession and Anticonfession  The popularity of the confessional mode testifies, of course, to the new narcissism that runs all
[17]
through American culture; but the best work in this vein attempts, precisely through self-disclosure, to achieve a critical distance from the self and to gain insight into the historical forces, reproduced in psychological form, that have made the very concept of selfhood increasingly problematic. The mere act of writing already presupposes a certain detachment from the self; and the objectification of one's own experience, as psychiatric studies of narcissism have shown, makes it possible for "the deep sources of grandiosity and exhibitionism—after being appropriately aim-inhibited, tamed, and neutralized—[to] find access" to reality. [Kohut, The Analysis of the Self] Yet the increasing interpenetration of fiction, journalism, and autobiography undeniably indicated that many writers find it more and more difficult to achieve the detachment indispensible to art.

Well, indispensible might be a bit strong even for my tastes, but the point stands that a detached and...attached (?) standpoint have vastly different implications for artist and audience alike. We would do well to try to understand those implications as best we can.

One reason to beat this particular horse as relentlessly as I now do is that, among said implications, there are many properly epistemological ones which don't get the attention or treatment I would like for them. Also important is that these sorts of implications are not, I don't think, usually having anything at all to do with what motivates or, more sentimentally speaking, what inspires either artists or audiences.

Instead of fictionalizing personal material or otherwise reordering it, they have taken to presenting it undigested, leaving the reader to arrive at his own interpretations. Instead of working through their memories, many writers now rely on mere self-disclosure to keep the reader interested, appealing not to his understanding but to his salacious curiosity about the private lives of famous people. In Mailer's works and those of his many imitators, what begins as a critical reflection on the writer's own ambition, frankly acknowledged as a bid for literary immortality, often ends in a garrulous monologue, with the writer trading on his own celebrity and filling page after page with material having no other claim to attention than its association with a famous name. Once having brought himself to public attention, the writer enjoys a ready-made market for true confessions. Thus Erica Jong, after winning an audience by writing about sex with as little feeling as a man, immediately produced another novel about a young woman who becomes a literary celebrity.

...

[19] The confessional form allows an honest writer like Exley or Zweig to provide a harrowing account of the spiritual desolation of our times, but it also allows lazy writers to indulge in "the kind of immodest self-revelation which ultimately hides more than it admits." The narcissist's pseudo-insight into his own condition, usually expressed in psychiatric clichés, serves as a means of deflecting criticism and disclaiming responsibility for his actions.

...

[20] When T.S. Eliot appended reference notes to The Waste Land, he became one of the first poets to call attention to his own imaginative transformation of reality, but he did so in order to expand the reader's awareness of allusions and to create a deeper imaginative resonance—not, as in these more recent instances, to demolish the reader's confidence in the author.

When T.S. Eliot appended reference notes...
...he was...a century behind Berlioz, who was at least that far ahead of the aforementioned "confessional" writers. Let's not excuse the early adopters just because they have since become classics.

...to expand the reader's awareness of allusions...

...but it doesn't work that way. Just as he who laughs last doesn't get the joke, so he who must read about the allusions in the reference notes has irrecoverably missed the boat. What confidence can one reasonably have in an author who elevates spoiling the punchline from incidental to conventional?

[20, cont.] The unreliable, partially blinded narrator is another literary device of long standing. In the past, however, novelists often used it in order to achieve an ironic juxtaposition of the narrator's flawed perception of events with the author's own more accurate view. Today, the convention of a fictionalized narrator has been abandoned in most experimental writing. The author now speaks in his own voice but warns the reader that his version of the truth is not to be trusted. ... Having called attention to himself as a performer, the writer undermines the reader's ability to suspend disbelief. By fogging over the distinction between truth and illusion, he asks the reader to believe his story not because it rings true or even because he claims it is true, but simply because he claims it conceivably might be true—at least in part—if the reader chose to believe him. The writer waives the right to be taken seriously, at the same time escaping the responsibilities that go with being taken seriously. He asks the reader not for understanding but for indulgence. In accepting the writer's confession that he lied, the reader in turn waives the right to hold the writer accountable for the truth of his report. The writer thus attempts to charm the reader instead of trying to convince him, counting on the titillation provided by pseudo-revelation to hold the reader's interest.

Undertaken in the evasive mood, confessional writing degenerates into anticonfession. The record of the inner life becomes an unintentional parody of inner life. A literary genre that appears to affirm inwardness actually tells us that inner life is precisely what can no longer be taken seriously. This explains why [Woody] Allen, [Donald] Barthelme, and other satirists so often parody, as a deliberate literary strategy, the confessional style of an earlier time, when the artist
[21]
bared his inner struggles in the belief that they represented a microcosm of the larger world. ... The writer no longer sees life reflected in his own mind. Just the opposite: he sees the world, even in its emptiness, as a mirror of himself. In recording his "inner" experiences, he seeks not to provide an objective account of a representative piece of reality but to seduce others into giving him their attention, acclaim, or sympathy and thus to shore up his faltering sense of self.

It occurs here that Lasch is on solider ground in telling us what such work does than where it came from. e.g. Here, whether this is actually a matter of shoring up seems tough to say for sure, although there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence to that effect.

Lasch—The Artists' Road to Serfdom

Christopher Lasch
The Agony of the American Left (1969)

Mike Gold, writing in The Liberator in February 1921, issued a call for "proletarian art" in which he attacked The Seven Arts, one of the voices of the Greenwich Village awakening. No "great lusty tree," Gold wrote, could grow in "that hot-house air." Subsequent articles by Gold denounced "the mad solitary priests of Dada" and other purveyors of sterile pessimism and "pure art." "Since 1912," Aaron [Writers on the Left, p. 89] writes, "a polarizing process had been under way which divided the Bohemian from the revolutionary" and forced writers to choose between art and radical politics. But this polarization had not become critical so long as American radicalism remained a broad and inclusive movement devoted, among other things, to creating a better understanding of life under the existing order—something art is supremely equipped to do. Only when the new left wing shattered the Socialist party and substituted for long-term efforts to revolutionize American consciousness a mystique of immediate revolution did art come to be suspect in radical circles. The role of artists then came to be defined as one of dutiful servants of the "revolution"—that is, propagandists for mass culture against the stale and artificial culture of the literati, as it had come to be regarded.
(p. 50)

So, perhaps the conceit to creating a better understanding of life actually protected art and artists against mere servitude to revolutionary pretensions. Really there is a vulgar functionalism at the heart of both of these imperatives; but there is at least something to be said for being one's own propagandist rather than somebody else's.

Partisan Review represented the most ambitious attempt since prewar Village days to fuse radical politics and cultural modernism. From the beginning it tried "to put forward the best writing then produced by the Left," in Rahv's words. Attracted to communism for the same reasons that attracted other radicals of the thirties, because it seemed to represent the best hope of social change, Rahv and Phillips had also been strongly influenced by Eliot, Joyce, James, Lawrence, Yeats, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and other architects of the modernist tradition, and by Edmund Wilson's defense of that tradition in Axel's Castle, published in 1931. Somewhat disconcerted by the fact that much of this literature had been written by political reactionaries, they nevertheless recognized in the modern European classics a powerful statement of the terror and pain of contemporary existence—a revelation, they rightly perceived, that was of infinitely greater value to radicals than the shallow "realism" preached by V.F. Calverton, Mike Gold, and in slightly different form by Granville Hicks. "It is true," Gold sadly observed, "that the intellectual brings into the movement many of his bourgeois hangovers, but they can be controlled." Rahv and Phillips, however, as James Gilbert writes, were not prepared "to bury the culture of the past."
(p. 53)

Mumford—Art and Technics (xvi)

[Prefatory note: I struggled mightily with this final installment of the series, so much so that what should have been a centerpiece became an afterthought. It remains both incomplete and overlong. It is at least completed somewhat by recent posts, at the cost of adding verbiage rather than paring it. Such is the content-rich, editor-poor world we live in. Enjoy, if you can.]

Lewis Mumford
Art and Technics (1952)

The general effect of this multiplication of graphic symbols has been to lessen the impact of art itself. ... In order to survive in this image-glutted world, it is necessary for us to devaluate the symbol and to reject every aspect of it but the purely sensational one. For note, the very repetition of the stimulus would make it necessary for us in self-defense to empty it of meaning if the process of repetition did not, quite automatically, produce this result. Then, by a reciprocal twist, the emptier a symbol is of meaning, the more must its user depend upon mere repetition and mere sensationalism to achieve his purpose. This is a vicious circle, if there ever was one. ...people must, to retain any degree of autonomy and self-direction, achieve a certain opacity, a certain insensitiveness, a certain protective thickening of the hide, in order not to be overwhelmed and confused by the multitude of demands that are made upon their attention.
(p. 98)

...we only half-see, half-understand what is going on; for we should be neurotic wrecks if we tried to give all the extraneous mechanical stimuli that impinge upon us anything like our full attention. That habit perhaps protects us from an early nevous breakdown; but it also protects us from the powerful impact of genuine works of art, for such works demand our fullest attention, our fullest participation, our most individualized and re-creative response. What we settle for, since we must close our minds, are the bare sensations; and that is perhaps one of the reasons that the modern artist, defensively, has less and less to say. In order to make sensations seem more important than meanings, he is compelled to use processes of magnification and distortion, similar to the stunts used by the big advertiser to attract attention. So the doctine of quantification, Faster and Faster, leads to the sensationalism of Louder and Louder; and that in turn, as it affects the meaning of the symbols used by the artist, means Emptier and Emptier. This is a heavy price to pay for mass production and the artist's need to compete with mass production.
(pp. 98-99)

The Radical Restriction of Perspective?

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

Philip Roth once observed, before this kind of observation became a cliché, that the writer's imagination falters in the face of contemporary "actuality," which "is continually outdoing our talents." ... Our culture "tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.". ... In their bafflement and disgust, many writers turn away from the "grander social and political phenomena of our times"...and "take the self as their subject": the "sheer fact of self, the vision of the self as inviolate, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment.
(p. 130)


When social reality becomes imaginatively unmanageable, the imagination takes refuge, as we have seen, in self-defensive survival strategies: exactly the kind of strategies also adopted by the contemporary writer and artist, according to Roth, in their attempt to keep the artistic enterprise alive in an age of extremity. Overwhelmed by the cruelty, disorder, and sheer complexity of modern history, the artist retreats into a solipsistic mode of discourse that represents "not so much an attempt to understand the self," in Roth's words, as an attempt "to assert it." He conducts his own struggle for survival as an artist, under conditions that have made it more and more difficult to transcribe any shared experience or common perceptions of the world, undermined the conventions of artistic realism, and given rise to a type of art that no longer seems to refer to anything outside itself.
(p. 131)

Lasch—Of Valor, Chivalry, and Brains

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

The upper middle class, the heart of the new professional and managerial elites, is defined, apart from its rapidly rising income, not so much by its ideology as by a way of life that distinguishes it, more and more unmistakably, from the rest of the population. Even its feminism—that is, its commitment to the two-career family—is a matter more of practical necessity than of political conviction. Efforts to define a "new class" composed of public administrators and policy makers, relentlessly pushing a program of liberal reforms, ignore the range of political opinions among the professional and managerial elites. These groups constitute a new class only in the sense that their livelihoods rest not so much on the ownership of property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise. Their investment in education and information, as opposed to property, distinguishes them from the rich bourgeoisie..., and from the old proprietary class—the middle class in the strict sense of the term—that once made up the bulk of the population.

Since they embrace a wide variety of occupations...and since they lack a common political outlook, it is also inappropriate to characterize managerial and professional elites as a new ruling class. Alvin Gouldner...found the unifying element in their "culture of critical discourse," but even though this formulation captures an essential feature..., it exaggerates the intellectual component in the culture of the new elites and their interest in the rationalization of life, just as it minimizes their continuing fascination with the capitalist market and their frenzied search for profits.

A more salient fact is that the market in which the new elites operate is now international in scope. Their fortunes are tied to enterprises that operate across national boundaries. They are more concerned with the smooth functioning of the system as a whole than with any of its parts. Their loyalties—if the term is not itself anachronistic in this context—are international rather than regional, national, or local. They have more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not yet plugged into the network of global communications.

Robert Reich's category of "symbolic analysts" serves, apart from its syntactical incoherence, as a useful, empirical, and rather unpretentious description of the new class. These are people, as Reich describes them, who live in a world of abstract concepts and symbols, ranging from stock market quotations to the visual images produced by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and who specialize in the interpretation and deployment of symbolic information.

(pp. 33-35)

So, here is precisely the thing (or one of them) which Lasch misses in his earlier attack on postmodern art in The Minimal Self: much postmodernism (and modernism, and several other scattered radicalisms and avant-gardisms here and there) is in fact a no-holds-barred Counterelite Revolt against precisely this regime of

interpretation and deployment of symbolic information
.

Certainly this alone does not gain these artists any extra moral capital, but it does show, I think, a sort of dialectical antithesis arising out of the knowledge economy itself. Unfortunately Lasch, like many others, is so attached to the

symbolic

dimension of art, and takes such joy in

interpret[ing]

it, that monochrome paintings and static music are simply beyond the pale. That seems to me like a pretty severe misjudgment, not necessarily of taste, but certainly of motive and utility.

Incidentally, the beleaguered, embattled, fallen-from-grace sense of

interpretation

bequeathed to us by Sontag's famous essay
,

and also her likening of interpreters to "leeches"
,

and also the overtones of militarism and conquest inherent in

deployment
,

all of these are, I think, very good hints as to some of the reasons artists have staged such a Revolt. And the defense of this Revolt is laid out beautifully by Lasch himself in this final work of his.

A more serious objection than imprecision is Reich's extravagantly flattering portrait of the "symbolic analysts." In his eyes, they represent the best and brightest in American life. Educated at "elite private schools" and "high-quality suburban schools...", they enjoy every advantage their doting parents can provide. ... These privileged young people acquire advanced degrees at the "best [universities] in the world," the superiority of which is proved by their ability to attract foreign students in great numbers. In this cosmopolitan atmosphere they overcome the provincial folkways that impede creative thought... Unlike those who engage in mind-numbing routines, they love their work...

Unlike old-fashioned intellectuals, who tend to work by themselves and to be jealous and possessive about their ideas, the new brain workers...operate best in teams. Their "capacity to collaborate" promotes "system thinking"—the ability to see problems in their totality, to absorb the fruits of collective experimentation, and to "discern larger causes, consequences, and relationships. Since their work depends so heavily on "networking," they settle in "specialized geographical pockets" populated by people like them. ...

(pp. 35-37)

But here the Pomos are very much Collabos too, and this is both symptom and cause of the desperation (often enough material and spiritual desperation alike) with which so many of us now confront the flaming ruins of industrialism. It is in this co-optation of collaboration, its conscious weaponization against the time-honored ways of old-fashioned intellectuals, where I would anchor any broad polemic against various "postmodern" developments in art. By insisting on the symbolic orientation instead, Lasch's "survivalist" dragnet (in The Minimal Self) snares too many artists who properly belong, in fact, to the very craft morality he seeks to recover.

Universal admission to the class of "creative" people would best meet Reich's ideal of a democratic society, but since this goal is clearly unattainable, the next best thing, presumably, is a society composed of "symbolic analysts" and their hangers-on. The latter are themselves consumed with dreams of stardom but are content, in the meantime, to live in the shadow of the stars waiting to be discovered and are symbiotically united with their betters in a continuous search for marketable talent that can be compared, as Reich's imagery makes clear, only with the rites of courtship. One might add the more jaundiced observation that the circles of power—finance, government, art, entertainment—overlap and become increasingly interchangeable. It is significant that Reich turns to Hollywood for a particularly compelling example of the "wondrously resilient" communities that spring up wherever there is a concentration of "creative" people. ...

Only in a world in which words and images bear less and less resemblance to the things they appear to describe would it be possible for a man like Reich to refer to himself, without irony, as secretary of labor or to write so glowingly of a society governed by the best and brightest. The last time the "best and brightest" got control of the country, they dragged it into a protracted, demoralizing war in Southeast Asia, from which the country still has not fully recovered. ...

This arrogance should not be confused with the pride characteristic of aristocratic classes, which rests on the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor. Neither valor and chivalry nor the code of courtly, romantic love, with which these values are associated, has any place in the worldview of the best and brightest. A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains.

(pp. 37-39)

Repurposing New York's Aphorist Laureate for Very New York Purposes

When Yogi Berra plugged disability insurance, he could just as well have been talking about art:

When you don't have it, that's when you need it.

McLuhan—The Great Withholding

Marshall McLuhan
"Woman in a Mirror"
pp. 80-81
in The Mechanical Bride
(2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951]

This ad employs the same technique as Picasso in The Mirror. The differences, of course, are obvious enough. By setting a conventional day-self over against a tragic night-self, Picasso is able to provide a time capsule of an entire life. He reduces a full-length novel (or movie) like Madame Bovary to a single image of great intensity. By juxtaposition and contrast he is able to "say" a great deal and to provide much intelligibility for daily life. This artistic discovery for achieving rich implication by withholding the syntactical connection is stated as a principle of modern physics by A.N. Whitehead in Science and the Modern World.

In being aware of the bodily experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life. ...my theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time.

Which is to say, among other things, that there can be symbolic unity among the most diverse and externally unconnected facts and emotions.

The layout men of the present ad debased this technique by making it a vehicle for "saying" a great deal about sex, stallions, and "ritzy dames" who are provided with custom-built allure.

Debased because of all the sex? Or because the "syntactical connection" is throttled rather than teased?

Working title for my next record:
"The Syntactical Connection, Withheld."

McLuhan, ibid
"Magic the Changes Mood"
pp. 85-87

In Music Ho! Constant Lambert argues that syncopation in modern music is the symbolist technique of getting cosmic coverage by omission of syntactical connections... That, of course, is the literal Greek sense of "symbol"—the putting together of two unconnected things. (85)

We confess ignorance of the Lambert character and, in any case, find this totally unconvincing vis-a-vis "syncopation," which is sort of comically not at all like the Picasso ruse, not even a little bit. We really wish people would stop saying so. To get syncopation you must first have a grid, which is the epitome of "spatial location" and the antithesis of spatio-temporal relativity. Syncopation per se is pure syntax, actually. It's precisely the opposite of what these two proto-hipsters have jointly decided it is. It's more like Mondrian than Picasso. Too literal? Whatever "cosmic coverage" is, it sounds like a second-order effect. Syncopation is first-order, granular, atomic.

The passage keeps going:

The abrupt apposition of images, sounds, rhythms, facts is omnipresent in the modern poem, symphony, dance, and newspaper. Jazz, Lambert suggests, derives from Debussy via New York, rather than from Africa. True or not, it is easy to see that the basic techniques of both high and popular arts are now the same. (85-87)

Adorno said something similar to the last sentence. But I wish the deriving of things didn't have to be such a black-and-white "rather than" situation. Are we really doing this again? Is it so hard to accept that more than one thing can be true? (Yes, apparently.)

McLuhan—Kicking the Cigarette Machine

Marshall McLuhan
"The Corpse as Still Life"
pp. 104-106
in The Mechanical Bride
(2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951]

A generation later Edgar Allan Poe hit upon this principle of "reconstruction," or reasoning backwards, and made of it the basic technique of crime fiction and symbolist poetry alike. Instead of developing a narrative straight forward, inventing scenes, characters, and description as he proceeded, in the Sir Walter Scott manner, Poe said: "I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect." Having in mind the precise effect first, the author has then to find the situations, the persons, and images, and the order which will produce that effect and no other.

That, for example, is the way T.S. Eliot composes his poems. Each is slanted to a different effect. So that it is not something his poems say but something that they do that is essential about them. And the same is true of most significant painting and poetry since Poe and Baudelaire. Yet the baffled sections of the audience still seem to expect such work to deliver some message, some idea or other, and then they kick the cigarette machine, as it were, when it won't deliver the peanuts. (106)

Kicking the Cigarette Machine
MUST enter the lexicon!

ee.gg.

"David's crit was totally unfair. The BFA-1s kept kicking the cigarette machine and the instructor just sat there and let it happen."

"The notices for Julia's gallery opening were super positive, although the local newspaper critic kicks the cigarette machine pretty hard at the end of his blurb. He despises artists but also knows that as a professional he has a job to do."

"Bob was really looking forward to getting feedback on his chamber concerto, but the guest clinician from State University just kicked the cigarette machine and watched the clock. I think he has a dual appointment in Composition and Music Business."

"Working in the entertainment industry is fine, but forget going to screenings with your co-workers. Anything nonlinear and those bastards will be kicking the cigarette machine til they're on crutches."

"I wouldn't bother going to ITEC this year. It's just going to be a bunch of orchestra cats carefully disassembling the cigarette machine, scribbling PEANUTS on each pack, and then trying to sell it to you at the merch table."


All of that being as it is...

This reconstruction business is pretty hilarious. How's this working out for y'all? Still got a lot of

baffled sections of the audience

?

That's weird. I mean, you so totally

ha[d] in mind the precise effect first

and then you had the totally righteous notion to

find the situations, the persons, and images, and the order which will produce that effect and no other.

So weird that this hasn't worked at all even though you

reconstruct[ed]

everything so carefully. Sounds kind of like Taleb's economic forecasters trying to unfry an egg or unmelt an ice cube. Well...at least artists' b.s. can't cause entire banking systems or state pension funds to collapse. Actually, maybe it's better that we can't know exactly how our artworks will be received. Then we can do what we want and not have to think that we're total failures if even one person doesn't "get" it. I mean, bro, that's actually kind of twisted to be so hung up on whether other people "get" you. It's like you need their approval, or you want to control them, or you don't think you're good enough without them. Just do your work bro! Let the brain mappers do the reverse engineering, and be thankful that you lived before they finished

reconstructing

the life right out of everything and every body.

But do use the cigarette machine metaphor every time life gives you a chance to do so.

Boorstin—The Four Criteria for Pseudo-Events

Daniel Boorstin
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

pp. 11-12—the four criteria for pseudo-events

(1) It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it...

(2) It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced...

(3) Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous...

(4) Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy...

[My notes say:]

Does Hopscotch itself qualify?

Does virtually any arts event qualify?!

Jappe—Debord—The Supersession of Art

Anselm Jappe
Guy Debord (1993)
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999)

...to actualize artistic values directly in everyday life as an art that was anonymous and collective...in such a way as to transcend the dichotomy between artistic moments and moments of banality. (68)

I suppose this drags us kicking and screaming into trying to define Art, for if these are indeed hallmarks of supersession, then as such they betoken something of a radically different type. I usually argue for defining by reception rather than by intent, hence the notions of anonymity and collectivity are certainly not incompatible with classical and romantic conceptions of art. It is the blurring of distinction between the artistic and the banal, rather, which seems so thoroughly at odds with common sense, i.e via the Everything and Nothing problem. What could ever be more numbly terrifying, or terrifyingly numbing, than such a life without contour? This seems to place Art on a pedestal, thus representing the ecstatic pole which in alienated life is necessarily balanced by proportionately severe suffering. If the poles must balance, however, would moderation not be preferable to the opposite extreme?

[from a post-it, 2017 or 2018]

Give Me Back My Music, You Damn Romantic

McKenzie Wark
The Beach Beneath the Street (2011)

p. 106—music as the highest Romantic art; and Romanticism as the Dionysian opposite of classicism

Both taxonomies are trite, but I'd never considered them together, which places music precisely where polite Bourgie non-culture places it: unclaimed, mercurial, ultimately not to be trusted. As just one half of a dialectical pair (Apollonian-Dionysian), music is also incomplete, in need of grounding.

Incidentally, it is hard not to notice the complete absence of musicians in the SI and subsequent accounts of it, as well as similarly scant mention of music in SI theoretical statements. I suspect this has nothing to do with its Dionysian nature and much more to do with the Apollonian side of music's internal technical dynamics which the established mythology has reduced away.

Added Later: music CAN be just about perfectly balanced in the Ap.-Dion. respect. If anyone cares to pursue this. Probably true of all the arts. So, music pre- and post-dates Romanticism, but the Romantics get to claim it for their ends, and no one else's. Not productive! Music could, via a one-sided account, be posited as the ultimate Romantic art; but Romantics were hardly the ultimate musicians. In fact the opposite, strictly IMHO.

[from a post-it, 2017]

[the passage:]

The classical assumes a legitimate order, revealed by the light of the sun. God's in his heaven, the king's on his throne, all is right with the world. And what goes wrong can be rectified. Like Le Corbusier's plans, classicism favors the right angle and the straight line. It favors the form of the myth, in which order is destabilized, restored, legitimated. Its privileged medium is architecture. Its method is imitation. Everyone imitates the one above them in the social order, just as the king imitates God, and the whole social order imitates nature. Classical humor, from Molière to Sacha Baron-Cohen, ridicules failed attempts at imitation. In Molière's satirical attack on the Precious movement, provincial ladies shun some nobleman as beneath them, so these retaliate by having their grooms pretend to be Precious sophisticates. Hilarity ensues, but classical humor serves order.

The romantic is a corrosive fluid that attacks the classical on every front. It is a refusal of obedience. It lurks in the dark, in the mist, within the eclipse. Time is out of joint. It favors the wave, the vibration, the curlicue. It mixes forms, detaches symbols from myths, and puts them in play against all that is legitimate. Its medium of greatest affinity is music. Its method is creation, which it claims as a human potential, not a divine attribute. For Lefebvre the romantic intersects with a certain strand of irony. Unlike Jorn he idolizes the achievements of the Greeks, not least Socratic irony, which is the undoing of any order of belief. The subjective irony of Socrates anticipates the objective irony of history, which sweeps order away in its aleatory currents.

Consensual Art—Interlude

Peter Laugesen: And I also think that, you know, connected with potlatch and art and all this stuff: Art is simply a gift. Art should be a gift. Art should be given freely to everyone. Not because they maybe want it, but maybe because they don't want it. That's potlatch. I think we should change the slogan we have here to exactly the opposite: "Fear Everything Expect Nothing".

"Fear Everything Expect Nothing"
in Expect Anything Fear Nothing (2011)
ed. Rasmussen and Jakobsen
p. 281

Living in Los Angeles has convinced me that this only works if people have a reasonable means of escape/abstention. Trapping those who "don't want it" in subway cars or in their own neighborhoods seems to me quite contrary to much Situationist thought. We become the bureaucrats this way, no matter our intentions or class position. The saying "captive audience" comes from a bourgeois idiom; radicals nonetheless ignore at their own peril.

Perhaps if people can escape then it's no longer a potlatch. Fine. Sending them running is warlike enough for me! But they don't all run, not even when you most expect them to, not even in San Diego, Bismarck, or Pocatello, and that is the wisdom of sentiments such as the above.