crypto-fascist: awesome. add a crypto-, and suddenly the mindless, ill-understood taunt of our high school years sounds positively intellectual. sort of intellectual, anyway.
pwned. or, rather, PWNZ0RZZ!!!1!!11!
to set the record straight, the reference is — and always has been — to benjamin h. d. buchloh's essay "beuys: twilight of the idol, preliminary notes for a critique" (1980; republished in neo-avantgarde and culture industry, mit press, 2000).
the second most forceful passage in this early buchloh essay:
Beuys, in his general contempt for the specific knowledge of contemporary sciences and in his ridiculous presumptuousness about the idea of a universal synthesis of the sciences and of art, as late as 1966 phrased his disdain for psychoanalysis in a polemic agains the German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich by calling the discipline "bad shit" (schlecter Mist). Apparently, he follows the archiac and infantile principle that as long as you do not acknowledge the existence of real things that seem to threaten your ideas, they will not concern or affect you (NAG+CA, 51).
the important bit of backstory here, to neither say anything of what joseph beuys means to this discourse nor of the book chapter i'm currently writing that deals with alexander and margarete mitscherlich's epochal the inability to mourn (a study — my book chapter, not the mitscherlichs' book, obviously — that germinated from this blog entry), is the relationship between art and life. at around the same time as buchloh criticised beuys' "ridiculous presumptuousness about the idea of a universal synthesis of the sciences and of art," the postmodernism debates, involving, most notably, habermas and lyotard and concerning the relationship between spheres of specialised knowledge (e.g. art and science) and life as a whole, were taking place. but the key terms here are art and life, namely the early 20th century avant-garde's goal to reintegrate art into life ("Aufhebung der Kunst in Lebenspraxis").
we all know, of course, that the early 20th century avant-gardes all failed. every single one of them. no one — not the russian constructivists, not the dadaists, and certainly not the surrealists, whose shock is still the most bougeois shock of all, or the italian futurists, whose techno-fetishism turned into real-life fascism — managed to "return" art to life (this, it must be noted, all relies on the romantic fantasy that there was some edenic moment when art and life existed as one, just like marx's utopian vision of human nature as expressed through unalienated labour). the avant-gardist utopian sentiment that buchloh refers to envisions art, politics, and labour to coexist in the same lived experiences. there are no artists, politicians, and workers. indeed, one does not even follow the stereotype of the marxist renaissance man who works in the morning, waxes philosophical during the day, and paints at night. art, politics, and labour coalesce in the same activities. but the avant-gardes all failed. walter benjamin, one of this discourse's most oft-cited commentators, presciently warned of improper marriages of art and life, famously distinguishing between fascism's use of aesthetics to obscure its politics and communism's mobilising of aesthetics to reveal the true nature of politics (e.g. riefenstahl v. heartfield or brecht). all meaningful aesthetic discourse after benjamin's signal essay, "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduciton," concerns the relationship between aesthetics and politics.
it is on beuys' grandiose art into life claims — very very problematic claims about the rejuvenation of the german nation through art after the horrors and spiritual devastation of the holocaust — that buchloh mounts his attack. his essay ends quoting the famous last words of "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," though, to illustrate the force of buchloh's words (and the singular condemnation that accompanies his throwing down of the term "crypto-fascism"), i will reproduce the essay's entire last page:
The aesthetic conservatism of Beuys is logically complemented by his politically retrograde, not to say reactionary, attitudes. Both are inscribed into a seemingly progressive and radical humanitarian program of aesthetic and social evolution. The abstract universality of his vision has its equivalent in the privatistic and deeply subjectivist nature of his actual work. Any attempt on his side to join the two aspects results in curious sectarianism. The roots of Beuys' dilemma lie in the misconception that politics could become a matter of aesthetics, as he repeats frequently: "real future political intentions must be artistic." Or, even more outrageously:
How I actually bring it as theory to the totalized concept of art, which means everything. The totalized concept of art, that is the principle that I wanted to express with this material, which in the end refers to everything, to all forms in the world. And not only to artistic forms, but also to social forms or legal forms or economic forms. . . . All questions of man can be only a question of form, and that is the totalized concept of art.
Or, finally speaking in the explicit terms of crypto-fascist Futurism:
I would say . . . that the concept of politics must be eliminated as quickly as possible and must be replaced by the capability of form of human art. I do not want to carry art into politics, but make politics into art.
The Futurist heritage has not only shaped Beuys's thoughts on sculpture; even more so, it seems, his political ideas fulfill the criteria of the totalitarian in art just as they were propounded by Italian Futurism on the eve of European fascism. It seems that Walter Benjamin's most overquoted essay has still not been understood by all. It ends as follows:
"Fiat ars — pereat mundus," says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. . . . [Mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art (60-61).
as his frankfurt school friends adorno, horkheimer, and marcuse were being shuttled off to the american ivy league during the second world war, benjamin was writing his body of work on political art while running from the nazis, a race that he would ultimately lose. it is with the force of this knowledge that buchloh's invocation of benjamin's words about italian futurism and fascism attacks beuys' claims for a transcendence of history and cultural memory in the post-war era.
but here's the rub: joseph beuys and the italian futurists were not the same thing. while aesthetics and politics may have been a matter of life and death for benjamin, it was not for buchloh. to be fair, buchloh was writing in the years prior to reagan's visits to bitburg and belsen-bergen, the Historikerstreit, and reunification. there was an enormous psychic weight to invocations of the holocaust, in any arena of public discourse. [is this a plug for my book chapter on nico's performance of the german national anthem in 1974? —ed.] but, lest we get carried away, benjamin died. buchloh only lost his magazine (in 1975, the art magazine interfunktionen, in the second year of buchloh's editorial reign, published a series of photographs called besetzungen by anselm kiefer — a student of beuys — depicting the artist performing the nazi salute in a number of provocative contexts. that was the last issue of the magazine's legendary seven year run as one of the world's leading art publications — full story here).
buchloh himself later qualified his indirect accusation that beuys' aesthetics were fascist. in the introduction to NAG+CA, buchloh characterised his essay on beuys as "an essay that is marked by all the juvenile rage with which a return of the repressed can be encountered in or projected onto culture" (xxi). and that is why i'm always calling people "crypto-fascists," precisely because it invokes the passionate and hyperbolic criticism of one of my favourite paranoiacs, but also — and more importantly — because the paranoia is 100% justified.
so it's rhetoric rather than rigorous critique that i'm delighting in here. but i should disclose just a tiny bit more: there was an issue of the journal october that literally changed my life. i happened to flip through this issue one day in college, having just woken up from a nap in the periodicals reading room at hauser and finding a bound volume of october that someone had left on the table next to me with fifteen odd minutes to kill before it was time to grab dinner. i'd dabbled in art criticism before, but, as i read through issue #16, entitled "art world follies," fifteen minutes turned into more than an hour and, in the end, it turned into a lifetime. it was two essays from this issue, buchloh's "figures of authority, ciphers of regression: notes on the return of representation in european painting" and douglas crimp's "the end of painting" that made me want to do this aesthetics/cultural criticism thing for the rest of my life. and it wasn't so much methodologies that bit me; it was the moment of '81 and buchloh and douglas' dedicated and passionate critiques of the new painting (schnabel, salle, baselitz, kiefer, et alia). it was the kind of hyperbole that can't be called grossly inappropriate because it stands before real, urgent political stakes. it was buchloh belittling beuys in a crucial moment for post-war german identity, and it was douglas declaring in 1987 that "Anything said or done about AIDS that does not give precedence to the knowledge, the needs, and the demands of people living with AIDS must be condemned." but, as i later came to realise, it was also when buchloh and douglas backed up their rhetoric with as much rigour as any critic of their generation.
10/27/07
LITTLE PIGLET WENT TO MARKET
i wanted to begin this "as you undoubtedly know...", but that's actually not the right thing to say. as you might know, the torrent site oink.cd (née oink.me.uk) was shut down by a number of law enforcement forces earlier this week. but, although you probably do know, it's not undoubtable for two reasons: 1. the site was a semi-secret society, and 2. you're not all a bunch of no good pirates (though, again, a good number of you are).
It was the digital music version of the burning of the Library at Alexandria.
They destroyed the greatest historical archive of rock so they could make a couple more bucks off Rhianna's "Umbrella."
on that first note, insofar as oink was a secret, everyone who wanted an invitation knew someone (and if not in real life, then online) who had one. and, as these things inevitably grow, they get shut down. turn turn turn. but the lesson here is not that there are no secrets on the internet (though that is a good lesson), but that if you're widely and illegally distributing something produced and sold by multi-national billion dollar industries, eventually, somebody's probably going to put a stop to it. this is why XXXXXXX, an invite-only music site with strict rules prohibiting the sharing of any RIAA-affiliated material, and XXXXXXXX, an invite-only film site with strict rules about mainstream content, are still around. there are, to be sure, secret societies on the internet (which is not to say that the authorities don't know about them, merely that no one can or cares to do anything to stop them). but make no mistake; there are no secret societies where you'll be able to share "umbrella" on a large scale without it eventually coming to an end.
oink.cd founder alan ellis:
My site is no different to something like Google. If Google directed someone to a site [where] they can illegally download music, [Google is] doing the same as what I have been accused of. I am not making any OiNK users break the law. People don't pay to use the site.
Ellis makes, I think, a decent point. Google does offer links to illegal downloading sites (including Oink, by the way). Even worse — at least, I think so — Google also offers links to sites offering porn downloads and illegal drug sales. Downloading an album doesn't seem that bad by comparison.
Not that I would advocate forcing Google to more closely censor what it searches for (and if the "Jew" incident proves anything, Google isn't interested in changing its ways to avoid sticky situations). But maybe Alan Ellis is right when he claims that "it will change the Internet as we know it" if this case ever makes it to court. After all, illegal is illegal. And anyone who directs users to an illegal act should be prosecuted equally.
This is contracting AIDS on September 11th. This is the blood of a loved one staining the fur of a kitten. This is the televised rape of a helpless grandmother by a laughing clown. This is the Holocaust as a reality show. This is Carlos Mencia Live from Darfur. This is George W. Bush's morning breath whispering come-ons in your ear-hole. This is Hurricane Katrina surfacing in Rwanda. This is a faceful of liquid molten shit.
There is no tomorrow. Only hot tears. Will we ever know love again?
and there we have it. it's not the internet that has been changed by all this, but our relationship to music. napster began in the fall of 1999, my freshman year of college. my students, current college freshmen, were ten years old in 1999. i was ten years old when i bought my first cassette (please hammer don't hurt 'em), which leads me to believe that some of these kids may never have had to pay for music. but, of course, they want and require it, as we all do. obviously, the hyperbolic reaction quoted above is completely uncalled for, and many of the likeminded reactions to be found online may be a bit drastic, but these all speak to a sense of entitlement to music in the younger generation that suggests to me that this industry can't possibly survive in its current guise.
consider these words by dj/rupture, upon finding his entire oeuvre — including hastily conceived self-released things in tiny runs no one should have held onto — on oink:
You don't think, "Oh, this is piracy." This is memory. This is the catalog here. If my hard drive gets destroyed, there'll still be copies out there.
>> i find it terribly amusing that i've become the
>> curator of the
>> godfrzrzej j. ljung musical library. i feel
>> compelled to reiterate
>> that someday, if i should ever become strapped for
>> cash, i'll threaten
>> to reissue that album you recorded during our
>> freshman year at reed. i
>> figure you'll pay a healthy sum to keep it out of
>> circulation, n'est-ce
>> pas?
>
> a clever idea; however, one that has already been
> thought of. the good people at slumrecs(.com) already
> threatened me with that course of action. only,
> unfathomably, it wasn't blackmail; it was because they
> actually wanted to release it, because they,
> completely unfathomably, think it's my best work and
> think others should hear it. i, in turn, had to
> threaten them with legal action, invoking yr name, of
> course.)
it's a song by the band gray (the contemporary, reformed version of gray, not the ca. '81 basquiat/gallo lineup), written by michael holman, who helped launch the careers of basquiat, fab 5 freddie, afrika bambaataa, and kool herc, and was an executive producer on beat street in that '81 moment. (nb. here i am referring to the long '81, which is a lot like the long '93, or, if you must, the long 19th century.)
the (ersatz) answer avoids the question by invoking the cosmopolitan bogeyman, that supposed leveller of cultural difference ——
upwardly mobile men — who probably discuss the virtues of one malt whisky over the other, who possibly holiday abroad, whose children certainly go to private schools that teach in English — using one of the many international codes they've learnt in their cosmopolitan lives, the Esperanto of bigotry.
nb. as always, the sweetest fruit is in the comments. e.g. ——
Kesavan is just an Uncle Tom [...] The point is that Indians don't know racism, they just have a way of enjoying politically incorrect humour. I can remember watching the Hirwani test in 1987 and someone shouting 'White Walsh' at Courtney Walsh who was on the boundary line. Walsh turned around and had a bemused expression as he smiled at a man who was the same shade of colour as he was, who was chanting this line. But when the same Aussies who call Indians 'bus drivers' and Sri Lankans 'black c-nts' have a problem with being addressed as monkeys, that becomes really precious like Mark Waugh said. The bottom line is that if you can't take it, don't give it. Shut up and play cricket or else....
Posted by John_2506 on October 21 2007, 23:27 PM GMT
or, as another commentator characterises this apparently popular sentiment, "They are racists so it is ok for us to be racists back." still, no tough questions (including "anthropological" ones concerning the sentiment above in its historical and cultural context) answered or really addressed in the end (though it should be noted that the author's own "stop treating us like anthropological objects" sentiment is well-taken here).
in other news, thomas friedman in the times: "Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs." and, later,
This is how scale change happens. When the Big Apple becomes the Green Apple, and 40 million tourists come through every year and take at least one hybrid cab ride, they’ll go back home and ask their leaders, "Why don’t we have hybrid cabs?"
silly and reductive quip aside, i'd like to pat him on his head and say, "yes, tom. hurrah for globalization. hurrah for new york, beacon of cosmopolitanism, and the international ethico-political vanguard. and, while we're at it, hurrah for representative democracy, which has been proven time and again to work. the logic of global capital and its bottom line has nothing these." makes me sick.
raymond pettibon's response to the crypto-fascism:
i want to say that i have no time for friedman, i.e. our generation's daniel bell, i.e. the end of ideology 2K, i.e. someone who would naïvely declare,
When the Big Apple becomes the Green Apple, and 40 million tourists come through every year and take at least one hybrid cab ride, they’ll go back home and ask their leaders, "Why don’t we have hybrid cabs?"
and immediately follow it with a cynical, lazy, and totalising think-globally-and-assume-for-no-good-reason-that-you-are-acting-globally sentiment like,
So if you want to be a green college kid or a green adult, don’t fool yourself: You can change lights. You can change cars. But if you don’t change leaders, your actions are nothing more than an expression of, as Dick Cheney would say, "personal virtue."
but maybe pettibon is right to take the time.
10/16/07
IN WHICH THE BRITISH MUSIC PRESS CONTINUES TO MAKE LONG STRINGS OF INCOMPREHENSIBLE REFERENCES AND ANNOYINGLY SELF-SATISFIED INJOKES
i know i make a lot of obscure references and sometimes the jokes are hard to follow, but my blog doesn't read like this, does it?
also, half c.d., half vinyl. wave of the future? surfing the analog/digital dialectic? something else expressible by some other ocean metaphor? (e.g., boat, fish, or whale?)
i'm putting together a midterm review session for my art history 101 class this afternoon. i was speaking to patrik a few weeks ago and he suggested this multiple choice exam question ——
our real destination last weekend was dia: beacon, which (apostrophe to the doubters out there — you know who you are) did not in any way disappoint.
some of you know the real story. it began in late june, in the middle of an at times trying road trip. you know how group travelling can be. so, after a week of too much coordinating and us all having to do everything together — not to mention my having to spend every night editing and sending drafts back and forth with art journal and alex on crutches the entire time — alex and i up and drove off one morning to paterson, nj. the journey to paterson, involving several wrong turns and many hours of new york and jersey turnpike traffic, plus the general decriptude of paterson/the passaic (what the hell did we expect?), put us in an even crabbier mood. which made beacon all the more wonderful and idyllic and... la la la la la.
it turns out the museum was closed that day, but we spent hours in dia's garden, breathing fresh air, smoking cigarettes (because we still did that then), and enjoying the solitude and the quiet. at one point, we were like, "what is that sound?" it sounded like an æolian harp in the distance. over the course of what seemed like hours, it very very slowly became more distinct (and more distinctly minimalist organ music) until it just stopped. we found out last weekend that it was a sound installation by max neuhaus that automatically repeats through the day:
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound
[...]
I listen'd, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
you know, like, "holy shit. this really is arcadia." and, to give you a fuller picture, this is what the sky in beacon looked like —
anyway, so we went back to beacon after a quite trying september and first bit of october in the 'rotch. and we made sure this time that the museum was open. everything about the museum, lit from the sky, was perfect. the walls and walls of enormous sol lewitt line drawings whose delicacy haunted you when it was bright out and which exuded a dullness and melancholy as the day went on; acht grau; my new favourite artist blinky palermo; the agnes martin watercolours;
and our beloved fred sandback (the picture above is of sandback at zwirner; they don't let you take pictures inside dia: beacon). and that was just the work that made us laugh, cry, act like children, never want to leave.
this morning, alex pointed me to this article on beacon in today's new york times magazine. and, as we'd already learned from how the sol lewitts changed in intensity through the day (though the dan flavins became more and more poignant as it grew darker), et in arcadia ego; even arcadia must come to an end. that beautiful music from on yonder was just a dumb sound installation. and the greatest place in the world depends on big business and rich people and their egos. but, you know (read: apostrophe to andrea fraser, whom all of this also made emo and whose essay "from the critique of institutions to an institution of critique" shares this moral), sometimes i need my (highly ideological forms of) escapism too.
10/11/07/
ARMENIA, IN QUESTION STILL
the thing is, i can't say whether the armenian massacre was, indeed, a genocide. in a way, that's really not the issue. which is to say that whether it merits comparison to the holocaust is beside the point, that turkey still has to deal with what happened on a national level (which, it seems, has not happened).
but, in another way, whether the armenian massacre was a genocide is precisely the issue. which is to say that if we're going to create a moral category, this category has to have limits. and those limits must be rigorously defined and maintained. rony brauman of médecins sans frontières has spoken eloquently about the gravity of this category. "genocide," of course, comes with an urgency that compels the international community to mobilise military action. "genocide" necessitates drastic action, action that often comes prior to a measured analysis of the situation and of the possible negative consequences of this action.
we all know that the armenian massacre happened long ago and that nobody is going to firebomb turkey one way or the other. however, whether or not the united states or anyone else recognises it as a genocide does have dire life and death consequences in the present. again, lacking the historical perspective to determine whether what happened in turkey all that time ago does or does not qualify as genocide, the matter is of the utmost importance because there are many options (diplomacy, trade embargoes, e.g.) short of a full-scale military intervention or bombing people back into the stone age to consider when analysing a situation that might be similar in certain respects to the armenian massacre.
the "never again" of holocaust discourse bears thinking through. of course, the holocaust must never happen again. and, on one level, it will of course never happen again, for historical events are heterogeneous. history cannot repeat itself. so we must think very carefully about our historical categories (assuming we need categories at all, assuming that an international code of morality is the best way to legislate), about what must "never again" take place, lest, to put it extremely simply and crudely, our answer to every armed international dispute is to reproduce the allied bombings of dresden, etc.
GOOD THING I'M NOT A SUCKER AND DIDN'T PAY FOR THE NEW RADIOHEAD ALBUM
(as you probably know, the band has adopted a met-like pay what you can policy for the mp3 downloads of in rainbows.)
the new radiohead album, in rainbows, dropped while i was sleeping. i'm listening to it for the first time (in bed) right now. as reported by pitchfork this morning, it turns out that all mp3s of said new album, whether paid for or not, are shoddily encoded at the shoddy bitrate of 160 kb/s (a fact the band failed to mention when it was asking people to pay for said shoddy mp3s). it's like they're throwing the shoddiness in the faces of their generally quite sanctimonious fans, saying to all those honest, righteous souls, "deeez nutz. you paid £5, £10 for extra-shoddy mp3s. and you'll probably spend another £40 on the [shoddily expensive] official release when it comes out in a few months. thanks, suckaz." shoddy, this business. shoddiness aside, i would still like to say to those sanctimonious radiohead fans, "who are you kidding? as if you actually paid for those caribou mp3s you downloaded in august. and now you're choosing to give your music-buying dollars to... radiohead? shit, dudes."
ADDENDUM: sorry, the download ticket no longer works. go here to get your own. in other news, what scott plagenhoef said in pfork today:
It's also a bit of a reverse bait-and-switch: The group is offering a pricy box set for release in December (charging £40, including shipping) as the only current consumer choice, and then giving away what many already get for free (the album's actual music), but asking you whether you'd be willing to pay for the files. It's as weirdly conservative as it is revolutionary, a convoluted pricing-and-release schedule that leans heavily on a high-end product rather than the music itself. Radiohead are asking you to value the presentation — the tangential and the tangible — instead of the sounds coming out of your speakers, in the process admitting what any teenager with a high-speed computer and a sense of entitlement will tell you these days: To a large subset of "consumers," music is no longer worth the price of the CDs it's printed on.
Radiohead's pay-what-you-like idea may be a one-off gimmick, or it may be the future of the industry. But maybe the digital revolution has given the bands a bit too much power. Maybe Radiohead need a record company. Maybe they need someone to tell them their output is getting a bit samey now and isn't actually that good, and maybe they should try something else. And maybe the record company needs them, to get a slice of that sale in order to fund the next Radiohead, whoever that may be.
so, yes, based on my first couple of listens, the new radiohead is probably not worth the c.d.'s it's not (yet) printed on. and, yes, this whole (re?)appropriating the means of production business rings pretty untrue if you think about it. but (of course) i also find it pretty hard to swallow the BBC's "won't anybody think of the music industry" take.
and that's the same bullshit we're seeing here, even with this iverson story. "This story reaffirms my belief that just because he's 'street' doesn't mean he isn't one of the good guys." yikes, am i right? i mean, we're talking "underneath the cornrows and the gold chains lies a right decent human being" shit here. you know, like the rasheed as anti-artest spin: "he may look like them, but he ain't one of them." i have only two observations to make from all of this. 1. who would have thought we'd see the day allen iverson is hailed as a "safe" black man (or, if you will, a "good n—i can't say it, not even with quotation marks; but that seemingly out of place king kong reference makes sense now, right?) and 2. how didn't america already learn this lesson from the fab five (a.k.a. the decline of western civilisation), after it turned out webber was just a scared child and that all that "jalen is a cold-blooded killer" talk was just a metaphor for his clutch shooting?
ADDENDUM: cf. what some dude named coop said here: "Why did it take so long for this to make the news if he had been some black guy fighting dogs it would have been the story on CNN no matter what the President was doing but instead he helps another human in AUGUST and it finally gets in the news in OCTOBER. And the media doesn't have issues."
10/01/07
SEEN YR VIDEO/YR PHONY ROCK AND ROLL/WE DON'T WANNA KNOW
1. documentation of illuminated manuscripts, april 6, 2007. what was illuminated manuscripts? answers here (nb. the limitations of the archive), here (the site of illuminated manuscripts, anyway), and here (long answer you probably didn't want to read).
2. sonic youth's performance of daydream nation at mccarren pool in brooklyn, ny on july 28th, 2007.
nb. tacky concert promoters turn gerhard richter's kerze into the apple logo.nb2. this was the encore. they're actually playing "reena" from last year's rather ripped, not anything from daydream nation.
incidentally, i love how youtube embeds fuck up this blog.
