r.mutt's blog

11/29/06 A NOTE ON GERHARD RICHTER'S 18. OKTOBER, 1977 i wrote two essays that concerned gerhard richter last spring. the first, entitled "four hangings and a funeral," dealt with the hanging of his much lauded (and incredibly overrated) 18. oktober, 1977 series of "history paintings." my reading of the paintings, as originally installed during the 2002 MoMA "gerhard richter: 40 years of painting" retrospective, depended on three consecutive paintings: gegenüberstellung 3, erhängte, and zelle. the mugshot profile of ensslin in gegenüberstellung 3 is a mirror image of the dead gudrun ensslin in erhängte. furthermore, the curtain that foregrounds the image in erhängte is echoed by andreas baader's robe hanging from the door in zelle. the repetition of hanging elements (ensslin's head, ensslin's body, the curtain, baader's robe), i argued, solicited the viewer's identification with the baader-meinhof gang qua subjects of law through its concern with state-administered punishment and interpellation, with visibility (the fact that these paintings were painted from newspaper photographs) and invisibility (the curtain, the cell), with being and not being, with embodiment and disembodiment (ensslin wearing the robe and baader's empty robe, the photograph taken after he had died). it was an insanely schizophrenic paper, with too many source texts, some theoretical insight, much that did not fit together, and this one lucid moment of art historical analysis. but i saw those paintings again this weekend, for the first time since january of 2000. they were installed in a seemingly random order, the living ensslin no longer in silent conversation with the dead ensslin, baader's hanging robe having little to do with either ensslin's robe or curtain. and what of the funeral (beerdigung), the series' (in)glorious summa? it was tucked away in a corner. so this basically obliterated my "four hangings and a funeral" argument. but it got me to thinking about the heterotopic nature of the series. if there is (contrary to MoMA's 18. oktober, 1977 catalogue) indeed no standard hanging order, we can come to a greater understanding about the paintings' relationship to mass produced images. indeed, in the repeated baader (tote 1, 2, and 3; erschossener 1 and 2) and arrest (festnahme 1 and 2) paintings, we see paintings that differ to varying degrees based on different publications of the same source images. this tells us something about painting in the age of mechanical reproduction and, furthermore, something about richter's painterly practice, for we already know that there are more of all of these paintings holed up in his studio. richter paints as photographers photograph, building up archives of images. that he paints grandiose suites of history paintings from photographs suggests a profound ambivalence in his painting practice. but why do we care? this is where art history and art connoisseurship fail me, for, if i can be said to be an art historian, i am nonetheless no connoisseur. what the fuck do i care about painting? moreover, what the fuck do i care about art? which brings me to my second essay that concerned richter, "painting's various ends." in it, i reasserted the classic 1980's argument, my specific words being that richter was "a conceptual artist masquerading as a painter." this statement unintentionally echoed jed perl's review of the "40 years of painting" retrospective in the new republic, which i came across for the first time today: "Gerhard Richter is a bullshit artist masquerading as a painter." perl continues: This seventy-year-old artist works in paint on canvas, but what he sends out into the world are not paintings so much as they are Neo-Dadaist puzzles engineered to inspire philosophical flights of fancy among art professionals who are more interested in massaging their world-weary minds than in using their jet-lagged eyes. what the fuck do i care about painting? i care about painting as a bourgeois ritual, as a medium of bourgeois consumption, as an ideological apparatus that reproduces bourgeois power. i care about gerhard richter not because he is not really a painter but because his best works invalidate painting. which is why, having the 18. oktober, 1977 series now completely changed for me (it was, to be sure, even more beautiful than i'd remembered, but all's changed, changed utterly; a terrible...), i am less enamoured of it than ever. unlike richter's earlier photo-paintings (or "painted readymades," as benjamin buchloh called them), the oktober suite merely transforms painting. it is significant that it was for the oktober paintings that richter became known as europe's greatest living painter (or, as michael kimmelman wrote, "europe's greatest modern painter"). we can see in these paintings richter's criticality and conceptualism gone mute. these paintings don't speak to anything but paintings — a transformed postmodernist painting, but painting nonetheless. this isn't good enough. these postmodernist history paintings may represent and criticise power, but only within the representational language of painting, which is to say that their criticism does not disrupt and, so, is always already drowned out by the ideological message of painting — and a genre thereof so monumental and spectacular as history painting at that. [this is not to say that the "four hangings" argument, had it survived, would have saved richter's paintings. the oktober paintings had all but fallen out of an early draft of the essay, but i was urged to keep it in so that the study would "have an object" (meaning that it would remain within the disciplinary boundaries of art history as opposed to becoming meandering discourseless theory — i mean the latter ironically, of course). the paintings were a convenient staging of what the essay was really about: the structural similarity between both law and revolution's dependence on the substitutability of words in language. elsewhere in the paper, i used antigone in much the same way.] all this was just to bring to your attention jed perl's essay, yet one more occasion to ridicule people with stupid views on art (some previous occasions: here, here, and here). 11/28/06 NOTHING'S EQUIVALENT TO THE NEW YORK STATE OF MIND when i get the photos back, i'll write my weekend in new york art report. in the meantime, this is the entry in which i brag about the records i bought. guess who found illmatic for $2.25? there were fingerprints all over the vinyl, but it plays perfectly. and who now owns a copy of surf's up, with the brian wilson solo piano version of "surf's up"? that's right, it's me. the other big find was the 12" single for the classic pete rock and c.l. smooth track "they reminisce over you (t.r.o.y.)." other awesome deals include LP's by karen finley [insert interrobang here] ($5), the ol' dirty bastard and macy gray "don't go breaking my heart" 12" ($3.50), < $3 LP's by aelters and numbers, and $1 early LP's by the small faces and scrawl. i just cut my fingernails and noticed that there's all this grime on my fingertips. but dirt under my nails and a few hours spent in hot and stuffy basements digging through crates are a small price to pay. a slightly larger price to pay was this afternoon when, just before we started for the airport, i spent all the money i saved finding bargain records on more records. 11/27/06 FUCK YOU MICHAEL CHONG. HOW DARE YOU SPEAK FOR ME? he said: "Too often we talk about that which makes us different from each other, and not about what we have in common. Canada is not simply the disjunction of different groups, different peoples, and different regions. To be a Canadian is also to share in common something with every other person in this vast land. . . . We need to speak about a common Canadian identity and move beyond emphasizing our differences." 11/24/06 IN LIEU OF A RANT ABOUT PITCHFORK AND COLIN MELOY i'm sorry, but i had to link this. two passages: And the site's honesty has a commercial impact, as Travis Morrison found out to his cost. His band, the Dismemberment Plan, made one of Pitchfork's albums of 1999, the 9.6-rated Emergency and I. Five years later, his solo debut, Travistan, got 0.0. Shops stopped stocking his records, and his career squealed to a halt. "Up until the day of the review I'd play a solo show and people would be like, 'That's our boy, our eccentric boy'. Literally, the view changed overnight. I could tell people were trying to figure out if they were supposed to be there or not. It was pretty severe, how the mood changed," Morrison told an interviewer earlier this year. and [brendan] Canning [from broken social scene] also believes websites provide weighty alternatives to the big corporations that monopolise mainstream musical consumption. "Sites like Pitchfork are a great answer to ClearChannel, who buy up all the ticket agencies and radio stations, and try to package new music as 'edge rock' or 'music for secretaries'. On Pitchfork you get a much bigger, less categorized range of medication. And kids like getting that tablet every day. It's a romance for them." okay, that second one demands a rant, but i won't give in, though it's tough to resist because i'm currently reading about "indie rock," the (ideological) illusion of political and cultural autonomy, and "subcultural capital." if you really want the vitriol and critical beatdown, go through my blog archives. my rants, they're all the same anyway. 11/23/06 THE RETROSPECTIVE CONTINUES: JOKE COVERS yesterday, i posted a nirvana cover and a thurston moore cover. today, we're going back a little further. here are three sonic youth covers, all recorded during the alice et dorval: an ownable art experiment sessions (2001), and all jokes. "expressway to yr skull" "schizophrenia, pt. 1" "schizophrenia, pt. 2" 11/22/06 THE RETROSPECTIVE CONTINUES: EARLY 90'S, PT. 2 more the emo years: 1997-2001 outtakes, both recorded in 1999, when i was recording my first album 18 satisfying rounds of unskilled laughter. no one but me has heard these before. "ono soul" (thurston moore cover) "serve the servants" (nirvana cover) later on 11/22/06 WHAT THE FUCK, MISSILE? man oh man, shit is more than ever out of hand. once again, balls to fucking ehud olmert. 11/21/06 THE RETROSPECTIVE CONTINUES: EARLY 90'S, PT. 1 the reason no one has received his or her official monoculture fan club packages yet is because the retrospective would not be complete without "the first monoculture song," the legendary "tippi stardust" that geoffy and i recorded the day we got home from our equally legendary "homeless spring break." if anyone out there still has an mp3 (or the master tape, ahem jonathan), CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY. in the meantime, i'll be posting outtakes from the emo years: 1997-2001 in the coming days. these, mostly covers, didn't make the cut, but i'm self-involved enough to think that someone out there wants to hear them. first up: my cover of built to spill's "nowhere nothing fuck up," which was itself a sort of cover of the velvet underground's "oh! sweet nuthin'." it was one of the first of my many many paeans to late 80's and early 90's slacker rock, recorded in 1999, just as indie rock was dying once and for all. i don't think i mourned it then as i clearly do now, but here it is, with dinosaur's obscure cover of the byrds' "feel a whole lot better" from '89 to serve as a comparison. "nowhere nothing fuck up" dinosaur "feel a whole lot better" (with lou singing) 11/20/06 AUDI 5000 je cherche en vain la porte exacte je cherche en vain le mot "exit." it started snowing last night. but i dropped my roommate off at the airport this afternoon and, in a matter of days, i'll be out of here myself. upstate new york can kiss my hairy yellow butt. 11/14/06 SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE ISLAND OF THE GRANDE LATTE i stole the title of this entry from geoffy. this is significant because i'm writing today to introduce my new photography series sunday afternoon at the art institute of chicago, which is indebted in spirit and in concept to both geoffy and to louise lawler. it doesn't need to be said that geoffy and lawler's photographs are infinitely better than mine. if you're reading this, you know that my music is just stupid jokes, badly executed, both technically and technologically. in the same way, my photographs, all also stupid jokes, are poorly shot, and done so using a really crappy digital camera. but, here is the series. the first four were shot this past sunday afternoon, at the art institute of chicago. the last one, taken that night in my bedroom in rochester, is a shot of a page from my new louise lawler catalogue. Sunday Afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago (12. November, 2006) Sunday Afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago Family Sepulchre Note on the Index, or: Wall Text and Footprint Photography and Its Discontents Never Again Photograph the Other* * a photograph of Louise Lawler White Gloves, 2002/2004, cibachrome, 29" x 27.25"; plate from Louise Lawler and Others, ed. Philipp Kaiser (Basel: Hatje Cantz and Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2004), p. 65. ** thanks, as always, to the lieb for hosting the images. 11/08/06 WRESTLING WITH ANGELS AND WITH "CULTURAL CRITICISM AND SOCIETY" my paper on nico's the end and post-war german aesthetics is probably as finished as it's going to get before i give it this weekend at the MLA hoe-down in chicago. here is an excerpt, complete with more songs about the politics of representation. 11/06/06 THAT'S 80'S COLLEGE KID/HIP ROCK CRITIC TALK AND I WON'T HAVE IT HERE probably no one who reads this blog is anywhere near as big of an MTX obsessive as i am. still, this may be of slight interest to a few of you. it's a 100+ page tome of interviews with dr. frank about songwriting conducted by ben weasel. it originally appeared on weasel's blog in 22 installments, then got lost in the shuffle when he got a fancier new blog. probably, he doesn't want it out there for free anyways, being that he was talking about publishing it as a book. good thing for the wayback machine (newsradio reference?). the title of this blog entry, by the way, is lifted from a recent ben weasel blog entry. (also, read the comments for the priceless "Fuck the Pixies too!" as well as "Jawbreaker were better than Husker Du," which is an opinion that i didn't think anybody in the entire world, including, nay especially, the dudes in jawbreaker, shared with me.) anywho, i agree with the sentiment, but, ben, you inflammatory schtickster you, you're never going to top the lieb's classic one-liner "you liking hüsker dü makes me emo." 11/05/06 I COMPARED THE SHAGGS TO WITTGENSTEIN how cool is that? more songs in patrik's mp3 blog about the philosophy of representation. i'm on a big mr. t experience kick right now. one day before my twenty-third birthday, dr. frank mentioned that he was putting together a best of the mr. t experience compilation and opined for fans to recommend track listings. the compilation, surely, is not going to happen now that the good folks at lookout! records have been legally restrained from releasing any new records by their many debtors. but i took a stab at my own MTX best of. because they were/are/will always be much more than just a punk band or just a pop band — and, certainly, you could never call them "just a pop-punk band" — the mr. t experience is probably the only band i loved in my young kiddie punx days that i still absolutely love and which i still absolutely love on its own level as well as because i'm so narcissistically given to nostalgia. download the mr. t experience: greatest hits here. i didn't include any of the early stuff, but, for you other nostalgics out there, download "now we are 21" here (think: affleck... not wearing sleeves). ah, our childhood. makes you feel pretty fucking old, doesn't it? r.mutt's diaryland profile tradition and the individual talents' friendster profile r.mutt's shopping list r.mutt blog archives