r.mutt's blog

4/29/06 SST SUPERSTORE at long last, i've gotten around to saying something about the new sonic youth album, rather ripped. there was a pretty active discussion on the album at a super secret punk rock message board that i'd be kicked out of for telling you about. here are a few things i posted there: okay, i've listened to it all the way through seven times since downloading it last night.  and i'm completely not impressed.  maybe you guys and i just have different taste in sy, but what the hell is this bullshit?  the songs are built around chords, the whole thing is just a bunch of arpeggios, there's harmonizing.  the song structures are reminiscent of the conventional songs on dirty and experimental, jet set, trash and no star and i'm not digging it.  i expect sonic youth not to be all that noisy anymore, but i don't expect them to stop trying.  and i never in a million years thought they would get worse after o'rourke left.  they should have traded o'rourke and a first round draft pick to wilco three years ago for nels cline and future considerations ('cos boy does wilco ever suck without o'rourke). then people started comparing rather ripped to their favourite sonic youth albums. most cited daydream nation, but others seemed to prefer sister, dirty, and murray street. then people started ranking sy's oeuvre. this was my response: it's just different taste. even though sonic youth being the best band of my lifetime is one of the few things in life that i'm dogmatic about, i'm beginning to think that, for right now at least, i only really consider three of their albums truly great. my sy list goes evol > daydream > a thousand leaves > bad moon rising > first album/confusion is sex/kill yr idols/flower/other early stuff > sonic nurse > sister > washing machine > goo > nyc ghosts & flowers > the rest. none of them are bad albums and i have them all, but there's a big drop off between sister and goo and, because sy has made so many good albums, the new one (like dirty, experimental, and murray street) really disappointed me. but maybe it'll grow on me. i want it to. later... it's not that i don't like o'rourke.  i like some gastr del sol records, i think that he made wilco sound like a much much better band than they actually are on yankee hotel foxtrot, and i think SYR3 is pretty good.  i just don't think sonic youth needed a fourth guitar/bass and, if they were going to add a fourth guitarist, i'd have liked to see nels cline.  but yeah, i do like the SYR records, especially SYR5.  but then i like kim gordon and, looking at the first page of this thread (and knowing what i know about most SY fans), most will only tolerate her if it sounds like "kool thing"/"bull in the heather"/rather ripped.  sister?  it's a very good record, i just happen to think that a thousand leaves and the early stuff is better. and, after some people's personal reflections on the importance of daydream nation to their musical development and some discussion of sonic youth no longer sounding young (to which i would contend that they never sounded young in the first place and didn't start trying to sound young until sister)... because i'm almost ten years younger than you, the first sonic youth i ever heard was when they used to show the "sugar kane" and "100%" music videos on tv.  i was eleven years old and a big nirvana fan then and, for many years, i never really got what the big deal about sonic youth was.  but then, until a thousand leaves came out, i'd only heard sonic youth's 90's stuff.  basically, i decided to give sonic youth another chance when "the diamond sea" was stuck in my head and i bought washing machine — this was, of course, before you could just download a song that was stuck in yr head.  "the diamond sea" isn't a particularly amazing song, though the middle part is pretty interesting, but the last twelve minutes completely blew my mind — it's not daydream, obviously, but that's what i get for being born in 1981.  i happily bought  a thousand leaves when it came out and then worked my way back from daydream to the first LP.  i ranked sister so low because i never really dug sonic youth trying to sound young or sonic youth trying to sound like a conventional burma/hüsker dü post-punk band.  their work up to evol sounds a hell of a lot more mature to me than, say, "catholic block."  but daydream remains a favourite of mine because i can hear the band's nostalgia in it.  the first and last songs are about trying to keep up with dinosaur (a wrong turn definitely, and this is what i blame for goo and dirty).  sister was sonic youth trying to be an SST band.  daydream was about sonic youth trying to be an SST band.  because daydream became such an insistent point of reference for so many bands (most of them bad) in the 90's, it never blew my mind the way "the diamond sea" did when i was fourteen or evol did when i was seventeen, but i think it does other things than signal a discovery of exciting kinds of music that few had heard before before 1988.  sy made a lot of wrong turns trying to get to act their age (parts of experimental and washing machine; nyc g+f and murray street), but they hit it, however briefly, on a thousand leaves and sonic nurse and i can think of few bands whose later records both act their age and are still very very good. i've been listening to an awful lot of sonic youth in the last couple of weeks. i went through their entire discography and, you know, i still think dirty sucks but i've also been going through this monthlong nostalgic obsession with the early nineties and dirty was a big part of that. but i've really been enjoying daydream nation again. okay, you know and i know that it's one of the greatest albums of all time, but, as you just read in the post above, my relationship to daydream is a little different than most. what i love about that album, besides the fact that it's a great punk rock album, is the way it displays how sonic youth dealt with the new generation of bands coming up in the late eighties. first i'll backtrack. on sister (1987), you see sonic youth trying to keep up with mission of burma and hüsker dü. in 1988, when daydream came out, dinosaur and the pixies had just released hugely popular albums. you can hear sonic youth trying to keep up with you're living all over me and surfer rosa and failing. but, in failing, they came up with something far far better, an album many consider the greatest album of the eighties. unfortunately, they kept trying to keep with the times and you can hear them trying to do the heterogeneous early nineties slacker rock thing on dirty and experimental, jet set, trash and no star. which is not to say that sonic youth wasn't being unself-conscious in doing this. look at "screaming skull." all that said, it's been half a month and rather ripped still sucks. i mentioned harmonising but that's kind of a red herring. the first time i noticed harmonising on a sonic youth song was the barely noticeable backup vocals on sonic nurse's "dripping dream" and that worked pretty well. the real terrible thing about rather ripped is that it sounds it sounds so incredibly effortless, which is to say it sounds like they're going through the motions. this is by some margin the most inoffensive and wallpapery sonic youth album. i'm not in any way implying that sonic youth is now trying to keep up with the shins and death cab for cutie, but i think it's fair to say that rather ripped is the death cab for cutie of sonic youth albums. but maybe it'll sound better in two weeks when thurston and kim play "what a waste" on gilmore girls. [notice that i restrained myself from employing the cheap journalistic device of ending a review using one of the band's song titles against them. —ed.] 4/14/06 TAKES A TEEN AGE RIOT TO GET ME OUT OF BED RIGHT NOW you can thank me later. here is a leak of the new sonic youth album rather ripped (release date: 6/13). it's encoded at 128 kb/s but, come on, it's not like you're not going to download the new sonic youth album anyways. comments on the album forthcoming, but probably tomorrow seeing as it's still downloading and i don't know if i can stay up much longer. i mean, it is sonic youth, but it's probably not daydream nation. 4/08/06 BLANKETS WRAPPED AND DRIFTING OFF TO SLEEP where were you twelve years ago today? i was up late watching tv with my brother. "sports page," which we were allowed to stay up and watch on fridays, had just ended and our mom was late coming in to tell us to go to bed. we didn't care what we were watching so long as we didn't have to go to bed, so we left the tv on channel thirteen as "u news at 23:30" began. that's how i found out kurt cobain was dead. growing up, the crackly seattle radio station i used to walk around my bedroom holding the radio antenna up in the air while listening to would have an all-day tribute to kurt every april 5th, the day the coroners decided kurt shot himself. for reasons i'm not completely sure of, i always made an effort to remember him on april 8th — in my younger years, i used to draw the k records logo () on my forearm, right where kurt had it tattooed (if you squint, you can see it at the very bottom left of the picture below). for reasons i don't care to get into right now, among people i've never met, i don't think anyone's life has been as pivotal to mine as his. i timed my column on early 90's guitar rock to be published today. here it is. goodnight. 4/06/06 A PICTURE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR ANYTHING my dear friend (and one of the most talented people i know) geoffy has a photo blog. today's picture is particularly good. 4/04/06 FIGURES OF AUTHORITY, CIPHERS OF AGGRESSION: NOTES ON THE RETURN OF REPRESENTATION IN EUROPEAN PAINTING from my oft-invoked interlocutor the lieb: see this. it's amusing that there are still a few quaint individuals who're offended to the very center of their being by dada. i would say, in response to elizabeth fisher's article, that, while such people are fully deserving of being the object of the lieb's and my ridicule, they are not to be taken seriously. which is to say that the uncritical dismissal of duchamp, dada, abstract-expressionism, minimalism, and whatever else by fisher and her ilk are merely the product of people talking about something they don't know shit about (art) but whose cultural capital they nonetheless worship. these people can easily be dismissed. what i really want to draw attention to are my ideological enemies, endlessly invoked in this forum though they are. among the worst offenders are michael kimmelman, peter schjeldahl, robert storr, and michael fried. i think hilton kramer is still around too, grinding bones to dust. my point is that these highly educated and extremely powerful art professionals should really know better. kimmelman and schjeldahl are chief art critics at the new york times and the new yorker, respectively. storr is a professor of art history at NYU and a prominent curator at MoMA. fried, who teaches at hopkins, is one of the most learned art historians alive and no less than william diebold, who is one of the handful of brightest art historians i've ever known, found fried so intimidatingly knowledgeable when he was in graduate school that he only felt comfortable speaking with him about baseball. elizabeth fisher is just some yahoo who walked into a museum. it's like the episode of the simpsons when helen lovejoy wanted to ban michelangelo's david: "holy shit, they have statues of naked men in museums?" (by the way, cf. this for background on contemporary art criticism.) "holy shit, what is this da-da?" but, i suppose, such is life when people with no sense of humour write about art. all of the writers i have named — fisher included — it seems, write from a position of profound melancholia, yearning for a return to a sacralised relationship to art. for the less intelligent of these writers — fisher and storr — the solution to this problem, the traumatic repression of art work that poses a threat to the coherence of their bourgeois value system, lies in a tautological reassertion of art, via cultural capital, into the economy of bourgeois value(s). david deitcher on storr: "storr has unfortunately prolonged the false impression that the postmodernists who rose to prominence in the early 1980's were only, and will always remain, a threat to those who, like himself, are the true lovers of art." note that, while "postmodernists" here denotes the critics and theorists (e.g. benjamin buchloh, mentioned below) whose work exposes the conservatism of positions such as those mentioned above, it can also be extended to include such artists as sherrie levine and louise lawler, whose work cannot be twisted (so far as i can imagine) so as to be sacralised via bourgeois values in order to reinforce those same bourgeois values. i suspect that i got into grad school by waging war with these figures. the first thing i mentioned in my application essay was reclaiming gerhard richter from storr. storr curated the celebrated but highly problematic 2002 MoMA exhibition "gerhard richter: 40 years of painting." storr hijacks richter for the bourgeois set by representing richter's œuvre in a decontextualised manner, in so doing presenting richter's corpus as eclectic for the sheer joy of painting and richter as an aestheticist easel painter, working heroically in the face of the "death of painting." storr's exhibition's focuses on richter's paintings, suppressing, for example, his atlas project and his life with pop: a demonstration for capitalist realism collaboration with konrad lueg. one of the most invigorating reads i've had in recent weeks is rachel haidu's review of storr's richter retrospective (if you can, track it down in your local library. it's a great critical beatdown of storr: documents 22 [fall 2002], pp. 27-37). rachel writes, does storr blame contemporary art criticism for driving painting out of its rightful place, and is he conscious that his insistent praise of the diversity of richter's work sounds precisely like an unconscious "work of mourning" for the good old days of modernist authority? (28) that passage was appended with the following footnote: "the real object of much of storr's anger is unquestionably the figure he apparently considers his rival: benjamin h. d. buchloh" (ibid.). it is ironic that i too am engaging in one-sided battles with the ideological enemies i've listed above. but, then again, as rachel aligns herself with buchloh (her dissertation advisor at columbia) in attacking storr, perhaps i can align myself with rachel, whose seminar i'm taking and for which i'm currently working on richter. but i digress. my point is that richter is precisely not an eclecticist or an aestheticist and that his work, following from a well-known argument of buchloh's, participates, however belatedly, in the duchampian tradition. for buchloh, richter's paintings (as evidenced by atlas, which exposes richter's process and which storr's retrospective suppresses) are "painted readymades." i laughed out loud when i read rachel's take: "[richter] does not so much enact descriptive titles ('capitalist realist,' 'history painter,' 'peintre intimiste') as paint the bunny-quotes around them" (36). for me, richter not only paints the bunny-quotes around "painter," but around "painting" itself. storr, influential though he may be, is perhaps the least formidable of my opponents and, certainly, he is the closest in spirit to fisher. fried is far and away the most intelligent. his way of dealing with the melancholia of being, as he puts it in amy newman's tell-all challenging art: artforum 1962-1974, "the last of my kind," was to cling to the modernist autonomy of the art object. this autonomy, crudely put, is a sort of secular sacralisation of the art work's immanence-in-itself. it was precisely the legacy of dada and duchamp that posed a threat to fried. (i should note that the aforementioned william diebold was a professor of mine in college and, thus, fried is another of my teachers' teachers.) william once said in a seminar that, as it became clearer and clearer that contemporary art was moving away from the work fried, in his capacity as a critic at artforum, championed (jules olitski being everyone's favourite example), he began to devote all of his effort to being an art historian, tracing an historical lineage that arrives at olitski and the other colour-field painters. hal foster wrote of fried's art history, "brilliant though it is, this historical project can also be read as a work of mourning for an object that became more and more lost in [fried's] present." and, while i often disagree with fried's work, it is unmistakeably brilliant. but what is duplicitous about his project is the way in which he memoralises his lost present by invoking the authority of the past. while more sophisticated than the easy invocation of cultural capital of storr and fisher, fried, in the end, utilises tradition to present colour field painting as an historical inevitability. that it is absent in tradition — replaced by minimalism, which he abhorred — speaks to the degeneracy of the present. but, for the conservatism of his thought, at least fried's historical project relegates his cultural authoritarianism to the past. kimmelman, perhaps the most formidable and, certainly, the most widely read, of my ideological foes, perpetuates an unending succession of conservative artistic ideas. kimmelman's work is the most formidable because, quite often, the objects he writes about appear to be in the duchampian/dadaist tradition. for example, it was kimmelman who, also writing of storr's exhibition, declared richter "europe's greatest modern painter" on the cover of new york times magazine. it was also kimmelman who called matthew barney "the most important artist of his generation." clearly, kimmelman trades in hype and what makes his criticism so dangerous is that he'll laud someone like richter — or even christo and jeanne-claude — for all the wrong reasons (much in the same way that adbusters, speaking of reactionary cultural conservatives who don't know shit about art writing about it, criticised barney for all the wrong reasons). and one would imagine that having called matthew barney the most important anything of his generation would lose kimmelman all credibility but, hey, that statement got me to see those onanistic cremaster movies, if only by dint of my fascination with ridiculous hyperbole and superlatives. (sidenote: it turns out that the village voice, for all of its own hypey shallowness, has better taste than the times.) and therein lies probably the biggest problem with kimmelman's conservatism: his platform. it's the fucking new york times. people who don't know shit about art but who venerate its cultural capital (as well, of course, as the times'), people like elizabeth fisher, are going to listen to kimmelman, whose aestheticising and depoliticising of the duchampian/dadaist legacy is far more dangerous than fisher's "this shit ain't art." and i don't know that critical discourse has any power to even dent kimmelman's — nor, via the authority of MoMA, storr's — impenetrable forcefield of cultural conservatism and ignorance. cluck my tongue and stroke my beard, what's to be done with this michael kimmelman? r.mutt's diaryland profile tradition and the individual talents' friendster profile r.mutt's shopping list r.mutt blog archives