r.mutt's blog

12/31/06 FRANZ LISZT, or: CLICK CLICK, BLOODY CLICK CLICK i'm at my friend azim's apartment and we're both working on papers. it's saturday, past midnight, and he just asked me where my end of year list is. i was going to dispense with the stupid ritual this year, but he asked and old habits are hard to break, so here it is. songs 13. paul simon "father and daughter" (surprise) 12. dj drama and lil wayne "georgia... bush" (dedication 2 mixtape) 11. justin timberlake (ft. t.i.) "my love" (futuresex/lovesounds) 10. t.i. "i'm talkin' to you" (king) 9. yo la tengo "pass the hatchet, i think i'm goodkind" (i'm not afraid of you and i will beat your ass) 8. justice "waters of nazareth" (erol alkan's durrr durrr durrrrrr re-edit) (waters of nazareth CD5) 7. the pipettes "judy" (judy 7") 6. clipse (ft. re-up gang) "ain't cha" (hell hath no fury) 5. duchess says "black flag" (noviçiat mère-perruche) 4. dem franchize boyz (ft. charlay and jim jones) "lean wit it, rock wit it" (on top of our game) 3. ghostface "the champion" (broiled salmon mixtape) 2. the blow "true affection" (paper television) 1. the blow "fists up" (paper television) records 13. excepter sunbomber e.p. 12. clipse hell hath no fury 11. finally punk get serious 10. the thermals the body, the blood, the machine 9. t.i. king 8. DAT politics wow twist 7. prurient/nicole 12 love & romance 6. dem franchize boyz on top of our game 5. mouse on mars varcharz 4. young people all at once 3. ghostface fishscale 2. television personalities my dark places 1. the blow paper television if it seems like i wasn't so much about the noise this year, it's actually because this year wasn't so much about the noise. and more about music with snaps in it. happy two thousand and seven. 12/27/06 THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM 12/24/06 SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY, or: I NEVER BELIEVED IN T. E. LAWRENCE it's christmas eve, babe, and i must ask: what would shane mcgowan (or, rather, shane mac gabhann) do if the queen offered to knight him? spit in her face, probably. and, most likely, there would be disgusting green bits of teeth in that spit. what will bono do? so this isn't going to go the way most bemoanings of bono's knighthood in the coming days will go. let me make it clear that i don't care about bono and i don't care about U2. they are, to borrow a phrase from one of my readers, "beneath my contempt." whatever good bono has done, whatever bad has come with it, whether he's a saint or a white neo-imperialist, self-serving and/or shortsighted and hysterical political interventionalist, i don't care. moreover, i don't know and don't care to know. but for bono to accept knighthood? i'm not trying to tell anyone how to be irish, but what about having a modicum of self-respect as a human being? even E! News knows that bono is a second class citizen of the british empire. just like they never would have called yeats "sir william butler yeats" if he hadn't declined his knighthood in 1915, they'll never call him "sir bono," or sir whatever his real name is. it's a small matter, this honorific, but it's emblematic of the fact that, whatever he might achieve, he will never be one of them. but the more important point is that he shouldn't want to be. my mother taught me to never trust whitey. and, as a post-colonial person like bono, i know very well to never take the name of my coloniser (or, at the very least, to reclaim the one i inherited at birth). bono, honorary knight commander of the most excellent order of the british empire? it's so astonishing that words fail me. p.s. here's something for the occasion... deeez nutz. 12/14/06 NEW YORK ART REPORT, PART ONE here is the first part of my long-promised new york art report. i was in the city for a week last month and took in more art than my brain could handle. i've already written about my encounter with richter's 18. oktober, 1977 at MoMA. this entry will concern my (very first face-to-face) encounter with my other favourite artist, daniel buren. first, the transcript from a recent exchange with my long-time interlocutor and image-hoster the lieb, whose presence prefigures every utterance on this blog: > > > and this personalized song for $10 business? > > > i think you're > > > selling yourself short. i'm willing to bet that > > > momus charged more > > > than that, and he's one of the biggest tools > > > that ever walked the face > > > of the earth. > > > > are you intimating that i'm a tool? > > > > not consciously, but, as you've often led me to > believe, authorial > intent counts for nothing these days. maybe i'm > enacting the traumatic > repression of some undissipated cathexis. it's > certainly true, for > example, that i haven't been quite the same since > they took sheriff > lobo off the air. > you just opened a particularly wormy can of worms there, lieberman. i'm currently finishing a paper on the discursive speech acts of the presentation of art and literature. a central part of this study is that the "death of the subject"/the birth of the reader via a turning of attention away from authorial intention and toward "text" is a red herring. which is to say that behind the authority of the author lies a far greater authority, that of the institution (museum/textbook/field of high culture, &c.). that "the death of the author results in the birth of the reader," as barthes so famously put it, is a false consciousness (as somewhat evidenced by the abuses of barthes' pronouncement by american literary critics like stanley fish, for whom the "decoding" of the "text" is an aestheticist enterprise, no different than "explaining the meaning of a poem"; all that has changed is the name of the object, from "well wrought urn" to "polysemous field"). the reader is precisely not born until we, as buren once said, "blow up the apparatus." unfortunately, as buren teaches us — and he's absolutely correct (and herein lies the failure of dada, as well as those of the russian and french revolutions) — certain structural conditions must be in place before we can "blow up the institutions." it is a humanistic fantasy to believe that we can begin again from a ground zero and, through the "natural" inclinations of human beings, live our lives according to marx's concept of unalienated labour-praxis. before we blow up the apparatus, buren says, we must unveil it. if not, we fall back into the humanistic fantasy of marx in "the 18th brumaire of louis bonaparte"; when marx writes that "the proletariat cannot speak for itself; we must speak for it,"* he foresees an imaginary resolution to the problems of class and capital in which the consciousness of the proletariat will magically be raised by the revolution because, for him, "labour power" is "natural," which is superstitious voodoo as far as i'm concerned. you, sharing my dim opinion of humanity, surely agree. the moral of this story, i suppose, is that buren is always right and that my youthful enthusiasm for anti-authorial readings has been tempered by more pressing concerns about discursive authority and the project of ideology critique. or maybe my move from barthes to adorno (who is not without his enormous problems) is an index of the passing of my interest from the french to the germans — or, as cultural conservatives in the anglo-american tradition used to say in the 80's: from french fries to frankfurters. but, i must ask, if your indirectly calling me "a tool" is a function of your inability to work through or mourn, what is the lost love object that you can't de-cathect? * the actual quote is "they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented [comma-splice sic.]." marx is not referring to the proletariat's lack of class consciousness but, rather, that of the small-holding peasants. my point, however, stands. —ed. ah, daniel buren. as longtime readers of this blog will remember, this blog really took off around the spring of 2005, when i was deciding on which grad school to go to. at around that time, i read michael kimmelman's stupid and very reductive new york times review of the buren show at the guggenheim. incensed but reconsidering the centrality of buren to my project as an art scholar, i decided (for this and many other reasons, one being a very stupid article on richter published, right as i had to make my final decision, by the professor i would have worked with at another program) on the visual and cultural studies program at the university of rochester. douglas (the professor i was drawn to at rochester), you see, wrote "the end of painting," one of the great works of criticism dealing with buren, back in '81 and that essay meant and means everything to what i do. so alex and i were at MoMA going through this big exhibition called "eye on europe: prints, books & multiples." we enter a room and i'm looking at these four blinky palermo prints on the wall. alex says to me, "look... buren!" i've walked all up and down bleecker street looking (in vain, and, in my heart of hearts, i knew that they hadn't been there in thirty years) for buren's stripes. here they were — literally right in front of me — and i didn't even notice. i didn't know what particularly to make of this. moreover, neither of us knew what to make of what buren's installation was doing there by the floor. where was the institutional critique? was this buren for buren's sake? later in the day, in front of manet's l'exécution de maximilien (the four fragments version). i was looking at the painting and kept walking closer and closer to the canvas to examine the relationship of the fragments to the canvas. the painting was, as history paintings usually are, enormous. so i'm staring at this painting in aesthetic contemplation when i trip on a velvet rope, no more than a foot high from the ground. luckily, i regained my balance and didn't fall headfirst into one of the most famous paintings of modernity. that could have been costly. here is an inexact photoshop artist's rendering of the scene (sans me tripping): of course, the scale is all off. and the manet painting was presented on a much larger wall in a vast room next to other manet paintings (the other version of the painting, l'exécution de maximilien de mexique, hung directly to its right). there were also no donald judd sculptures. and the rope was much smaller and less noticeable. but herein lay the answer to my question about buren. as i was falling, i experienced the uncanny — i'd missed the presence of the velvet rope distancing me from manet's painting just as i'd missed the presence of buren's installation. to quote the last paragraph of douglas' "the end of painting": Buren has always insisted specifically on the visibility of his work, the necessity for it to be seen. For he knows only too well that when his stripes are seen as painting, painting will be understood as the "pure idiocy" that it is. At the moment when Buren's work becomes visible, the code of painting will have been abolished and Buren's repetitions can stop: the end of painting will have finally be acknowledged. here, "end," for douglas, doesn't mean chronological terminus. rather, the "ends" of painting are its end goal and end result. the "code of painting" is its place within the logic of the museum. its "pure idiocy"? douglas is making reference to an oft-quoted gerhard richter quip: One must really be engaged to be a painter. Once obsessed by it, one eventually gets to the point where one thinks that humanity could be changed by painting. But when that passion deserts you, there is nothing else left to do. Then it is better to stop altogether. Because basically painting is pure idiocy. but where does this faith in painting that richter speaks of come from? the authority of the museum, i contend, animates painting with its high art cultural value. the velvet rope does the same: it places painting at a remove from the spectator and from the spectator's life. art, on the walls of the museum, exists in an abstract and atemporal space, removed from any meaning outside of its equivalence to all other paintings on all other museum walls (equivalent insofar as they are all equally subordinated to the rigours of aesthetic comparison). but here aestheticism comes at the expense of historical materialism. paintings, as presented on museum walls, have no historical context. they tell us nothing about the specific time and places they come from, nor of the actual political and social conditions they speak to. if a painting had a true social purpose, recontextualised within the museum, it becomes "pure idiocy." this is, i think, what richter meant. lest i be misunderstood, it is not that the museumified painting loses its social function (though it does), but, rather, that, after the failure of politically engaged, avant-gardist painting to resist its subsumption by the museum to aesthetic contemplation, the medium of painting has been exposed as politically untenable and, so, all painting after the historical avant-garde has become "pure idiocy," a priori. manet's late-19th century paintings speak to the social conditions of political struggle. unable to foresee the violence to his work that was to be done by MoMA's velvet rope, he believed that painting could change things. there is much to be learned from these conditions of (failed) political struggle — for example, the reasons for their failure. on the other hand, yves klein's paintings, klein knowing full well that painting changes nothing, engage in the practice of pure idiocy. his paintings speak not only to the conditions of inevitable failure but, more damningly, to those of already known political untenability, of prefigured aestheticism and consumption. proving just how much buren continues to teach me, this is the gist of the paper i wrote of to the lieb (which i still haven't finished). and proving that sometimes it's more important to actually experience a work of art face-to-face than to read 5,000 pages about it, i already knew all about buren. i've read an enormous amount on him, i've spoken to everyone who will listen to me about him, and i've written a lot about him, most recently a seminar-length study devoted to him and richter in the spring of this year. but then i actually encountered buren and out comes a (nearly) thirty page paper on the anthology and the museum (working title: "fragments toward an ethics of presentation"), one which should be reaching its thirtieth page right now and which would be but for the diversion that was this blog entry. 12/13/06 MONOCULTURE ROCK CITY some years ago, i read these words from matt wobensmith of outpunk magazine: All the people who are in charge of your punk media, who are giving out all these ideologies, have too much invested in not letting you see the outside world. They don't want you to. These people who edit the magazines, who run big labels, who may or may not know or like each other — they're all invested in keeping you isolated in this punk culture. It's just like a monoculture; just like society at large. They want to cut you off. They want to take away your roots. They want to give you a false identity and a false reality. They don't want you to see the outside world. at the time, i didn't agree with him, which is to say i didn't really understand what he meant. punk rock is supposed to be about political awareness, right? so go to the pitchfork frontpage right now. you see the "year in news" feature? that's what matt meant: indie-rock-as-lifestyle. yr entire life, filtered through that neat little d.ikea.y indie rock life-style you bought at the mom and pop chain store in the "cool" and/or "funky" and/or "alternative" part of town. 12/12/06 OUR NEWEST ACRONYM: "MMCP:(TO)RBS" monoculture media conglomerate presents: the new random bullshit series imprint. i should amend that: the tossed-off random bullshit series. does that sound like something you'd be interested in? because it's happening. i made up a handful of stupid songs the other day while staring at my computer screen, waiting for words to appear. merry christmas suckers. p.s. i also wrote the song that sahm commissioned. for the meagre price of $10, you too can buy a song about yourself. it's the perfect christmas present... to yourself. 12/10/06 ALL YOUR SUMMER SONGS at long last an mp3 blog update. 12/09/06 A NIGHTINGALE SANG "What a foolish wretch I am!" she thought. "There is no such thing as fame and glory. Ages to come will never cast a thought on me or on Mr. Pope either. What's an 'age' indeed? What are we?" and their progress through Berkeley Square seemed the groping of two blind ants, momentarily thrown together without interest or concern in common, across a blackened desert. She shivered. 12/04/06 CHE GUEVARA WORE A BERET in a brief hysterical moment, it seemed to me as if the world was saying "fuck you, bush" (it works on either bush... and reagan too). hugo chávez was reelected. chávez's reelection came at the heels of rafael correa's election in ecuador, which came just weeks after daniel ortega was elected in nicaragua. and, as a further "fuck you" to american imperialism on this side of the world, pinochet is on his deathbed. but then i remembered that castro isn't looking so good himself these days. and felipe calderón, after stealing the election from lópez obrador, finally took office this weekend. boo-urns, señor spielbergo. (ADDENDUM): it appears that the guardian is also paying attention. (later on 12/04/06) OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR, or: WHAT HAPPENS IN MANILA... there was nothing exceptional or even remarkable about this story, just one more example of really fucking self-entitled people doing something that takes an unimaginably (at least to those of us who may not be white and american) large amount of self-entitlement. there are lots of these people and they do incomprehensibly terrible things all the time. it was, however, nice to see, even just once, at least one self-entitled asshole get his comeuppance. forty years. good times. 12/03/06 CHRISTMAS EVE IN THE DRUNK TANK thanksgiving has come and gone. my roommate put up her advent calendar. my friend alex's landlord erected a nativity scene on her porch. and i'm here bearing christmas-themed mp3's in ambivalent memory of s.o.t.d. the groovie ghoulies "christmas on mars" 12/02/06 THE RETROSPECTIVE CONTINUES: VERY EARLY, VERY EMO here's something i don't think many have ever heard. it's a love song to "the core." what is "the core," you ask? i don't want to talk about it. if memory serves, i never released this track but for its inclusion on my contribution to "the core tape," of which there were only five copies. recorded during our last months of high school in the winter of 1998. "five" for those memory laning right now, a different sort of love song to my friends, one that concerns something called "town" (which i most certainly do not want to talk about): r.mutt "song for mike (but not about him)" (written spring of 1999; recorded summer of 2000) see also katy day's heartbreakingly wonderful "love song for my friends," previously discussed here. dear nora "love song for my friends" r.mutt's diaryland profile tradition and the individual talents' friendster profile monopöle!'s myspace profile r.mutt blog archives