...this renewed interest in painting [in the 1950s] had an important social function as a profound rejection of what critics perceived as the threatening aspects of the spread of mass-media technologies mostly experienced on a screen. (196)Here, then, is a dissent from mass-ification but NOT from abstraction per se. This seems more lucid than lumping the two together, since the concurrent use of the A-word to denote both (1) nonmaterial intellectual images, and (2) visual representations skewed to the edge of recognizability, inevitably clouds more than it clarifies; and so here we have an excellent demonstration of just what is NOT abstract about so-called Abstract Painting, i.e. its materiality...or at least one could choose to parse "immediacy" and "singularity" of "gesture" this way. Abstract art is itself; here KK gives an account of a moment in history wherein Jorn and others (Adorno is mentioned) would/could not see television as simply being itself, but rather fixated on its ability to REproduce, and on a "mass" scale. I suppose the theory of Medium as Message would hold that TV is an "immediate" experience of TV itself, not merely an uncanny reproduction of other content. There's really no Right Answer to that disjunction, just different ways of looking. But looking in BOTH cases is passive, so the fact that the painterlies also had powerful theories of collective (NOT mass!) artisthood really ought to be acknowledged as a factor here. It unifies their theory, makes it whole, and supports their claims above. Mass communication technologies would not be democratized for decades yet, hence there was no such thing as active/generative participation in either the medium or the message of the new mass culture. Hence when KK subsequently points to Jorn's own use of some modern reproductive techniques in his own ongoing work, it must be borne in mind that the analogy to television (which is the specific example used above) breaks down over the question of activity/generativity; also (more so yet) over the lack of mass access to the network of TVs. (The network, by the way, seems to have since become both the medium and the message; if Jorn et al failed to see this coming, it was because they didn't have to see it coming to know that anyone could paint but not just anyone could broadcast.) And as for "mak[ing] humanity more and more valueless," few developments have contributed more to that process than the networks by which us humans have been forced to learn how many of us there are and how much we all suck. The media theorists carried the day as soon as the mass- became able to generate media content as easily as they could smear fingerpaint; but this has indeed made everyone more interchangeable, hence "valueless," than ever before, and it has not actually brought us either literally or figuratively closer together.
...cultural critics who contrasted the material specificity of painting as the ultimate medium of sensory engagement to the alienating effects of the mass media, despite the media's own claims to collapse distance into televisual "immediacy." (197)
Jorn's interest in gesture was about singularity itself, meaning not an especially talented individual but rather the volatile presence of a subjectivity at a particular moment or in relation to such a specific image. ... Jorn's emphasis on irreproducible singularity turned its back on the ideas of technological progress that the historical avant-garde had believed in so strongly before the war. (197)
In 1962, Jorn wrote that the great inhumanity of both the camps and the bomb was their dehumanization of people as a mass: [quoting Jorn directly] "The threatening thing about the German concentration camps as well as the American Hiroshima explosion lies in no way in the atrocities, which are no worse than those happening in many other places on earth. The shattering thing is their colossal and blind mass effect that makes humanity more and more valueless." (197)
[from a notebook, 2018]
6 comments:
McKenzie Wark
The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011)
"The artist Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005)...had a rather different experience of the place [Saint-Germain] to Vian's bohemians, Vali's tribe or Chtcheglov's renegade Lettrists, because he was there with his little boy: "The Parisians are not so nice, that is why they paint abstracts, and that is also why they slam the door when, with Victor holding my hand, I ask for a room. Yes, everything is abstract here..."—even compassion. And yet writing about it later Constant could not but agree with Chtcheglov: "The atmosphere of this bourgeois quarter of Paris was so profoundly altered by a small group of intellectuals, the so-called existentialists, that it acquired international fame and even became a tourist attraction." (28)
[My note (2017) says, in part:] well, okay, abstracting in the sense of losing touch with the human face of one's actions, a la (famously) Reagan, or (less famously) everyone currently living in the first world. But this is not exactly the same thing as artists do even though we (lamentably, I suppose I must now say) do use the exact same word. And of course the ability to abstract is profoundly/distinctively human itself, mixed bag though it certainly is.
Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)
"in speech we tend to react to each situation that occurs, reacting in tone and gesture even to our own act of speaking. But writing tends to be a kind of separate or specialist action in which there is little opportunity or call for reaction. The literate man or society develops the tremendous power of acting in any matter with considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience."
(p. 79)
N.N. Taleb
Antifragile (2012)
"biology plays a role in a municipal environment, not in a larger system. An administration is shielded from having to feel the sting of shame (with flushing in his face), a biological reaction to overspending and other failures such as killing people in Vietnam. Eye contact with one's peers changes one's behavior. But for a desk-grounded office leech, a number is just a number. ... On the small, local scale, his body and biological response would direct him to avoid causing harm to others. On a large scale, others are abstract items; given the lack of social contact with the people concerned, the civil servant's brain leads rather than his emotions—with numbers, spreadsheets, statistics, more spreadsheets, and theories."
(pp. 88-89)
My note says: "has McLuhan grasped this?"
i.e. There are no villages, global or otherwise, without face-to-face contact. The synaesthetic aspects of current technology are indeed powerful, but they have reduced (or even eliminated) face-to-face dealings. McLuhan had no time for panicky types, but I think this is worth panicking over. I don't know how he could write the previous excerpt in this thread and go on using the Global Village slogan.
Of course Taleb's go-to exemplar of abstraction-as-inhumanity is Stalin, but again, don't forget that Ron Reagan has made precisely this analysis of his pops.
Adorno, quoted at
https://web.archive.org/web/20120522184419/http://notmeaniftrue.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html
"Modern painting's aversion to figurative representation, which in art marks the same breach as does atonality in music, was an act of defense against mechanized art merchandise, primarily photography."
Richard Sennett
The Culture of the New Capitalism
(2006)
"By hiring consultants, executives at the center of the [now-proverbial] MP3 machine can shift responsibility for painful decisions away from themselves. The central unit commands but avoids accountability. In practice, few consultants subsequently join the firms they reorganize, and thus they too avoid being held to account."
(p. 57)
"In creating social distances which divorce control from accountability, consulting reveals a fundamental shifting of bureaucratic ground, a reformatting of inequality, increasing social distance. Power can become concentrated at the top, but authority does not thereby increase."
(p. 58)
"The MP3 institution may celebrate the charismatic leader yet does not invite institutional authority. In part this is due to the way executives behave, when [60] they themselves act like consultants. Rapid turnover at the top can have this effect; there is then no one in power who has shown commitment to the organization, who has experience of its problems, who can serve as a witness of the labors of those below. In part, the sheer disconnect between center and periphery dispels the belief, at the periphery, that a particular human being or definable group at the center is really in charge. I found, in this regard, that employees at a financial services firm regarded "rule by e-mail" exceptionally obnoxious; all too frequently people received e-mails informing them they were being shifted, or even fired—"too chicken" as one person said, "to tell me to my face." Pushing away responsibility has a further dimension."
(pp. 59-60)
McLuhan, Understanding Media
"Perhaps the great revolution produced by the photograph was in the traditional arts. The painter could no longer depict a world that had been much photographed. He turned, instead, to reveal the inner process of creativity in expressionism and in abstract art. Likewise, the novelist could no longer describe objects or happenings for readers who already knew what was happening by photo, press, film, and radio. The poet and novelist turned to those inward gestures of the mind by which we achieve insight and by which we make ourselves and our world. Thus art moved from outer matching to inner making. Instead of depicting a world that matched the world we already knew, the artists turned to presenting the creative process for public participation. He has given to us now the means of becoming involved in the making-process. Each development of the electric age attracts, and demands, a high degree of producer-orientation. The age of the consumer of processed and packaged goods is, therefore, not the present electric age, but the mechanical age that preceded it. Yet, inevitably, the age of the mechanical has had to overlap with the electric, as in such obvious instances as the internal combustion engine that requires the electric spark to ignite the explosion that moves its cylinders. The telegraph is an electric form that, when crossed with print and rotary presses, yields the modern newspaper. And the photograph is not a machine, but a chemical and light process that, crossed with the machine, yields the movie. Yet there is a vigor and violence in these hybrid forms that is self-liquidating, as it were. For in radio and TV—purely electric forms from which the mechanical principle has been excluded—there is an altogether new relation of the medium to its users. This is a relation of high participation and involvement that, for good or ill, no mechanism had ever evoked."
(pp. 194-195)
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