r.mutt's blog

5/30/05 SEMIOTICS OF THE DAY "This is an age where symbolism is very important." 5/11/05 LA COSTE a propos of my entry from 4/13, some weird bullshit i saw on pitchforkmedia's ad panel: 5/10/05 TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENTS "I don't think that I'm a great songwriter, I don't believe I'm this wildly original individual. I don't believe that I'm astonishingly charismatic and really need to be heard as an individual voice. I do believe I take music very seriously. I do believe I am a very good manipulator of sound sounds and I'm very interested in how sound affects sounds affect my body mind and I do believe that that is relevant to how that affects other people's bodies minds." — james murphy that james murphy is a well-informed and well-spoken individual. the passage quoted above, with my ammendments, would make a nice mission statement for the record i'm in the middle of making. i have coldcut's "fuck dance, let's art" dictum in mind and perhaps it's pretentious — it certainly has been assailed as pretentious — but i think it's very true, at least to what i'm doing. i also have t. s. eliot's "tradition and the individual talent" in mind, which is appropriate because the record i'm (we're) in the middle of making will be the first under the new(ish) tradition and the individual talents moniker. but all this is beside the point. i just read this great james murphy interview and, as happens everytime i come across a musician who is a critic/historian/fan of music, i got all excited. in england, they used to say that "record collectors" shouldn't be musicians. this was levied by the british press against american bands like mudhoney, pavement, and, most vehemently, sonic youth. their point was that the analytical/critical mind shouldn't poke its nose into the domain of the primordial originary genius artist. eddie vedder = genius. stephen malkmus = record collector. kurt cobain spent his entire career as an internationally famous rock star telling anyone who would listen, "but i'm a record collector." personally, i find "record collector" to be a ridiculous term. whether or not thurston moore jizzes all over first pressings of out-of-print, limited to editions of 5,000 george maciunas LP's, that particular fetish is not what makes sonic youth's music interesting. what makes sonic youth interesting is the breadth of their collective music knowledge and their refusal to make guitar-based music that falls under the rubric of rock and roll (or, to be more precise, the refusal of SY's best work to make guitar-based music that falls under this rubric). the label "record collector" just trivialises the band and conflates commodity fetish with thoughtful listening. in a time when the best poets are poet-critics and artists are just as well-equipped to curate each other's exhibitions as the professional curators who compose their catalogues raisonnιs, why should we reduce the hard work of our musicians to numinous coups de foudre? but read the james murphy interview. it's good, even if his fans are all snivelling poseurs. 4/17/05 "AND DEATH ALSO CAN STILL PROPOSE THE OLD LABORS" as i was driving home tonight, thinking about the many recently deceased celebrities, the NOFX lyric "catherine [mckinnon] should be busy porkin' that dolt andrea dworkin/ they both could use a good hard fuck" popped into my head and i shuddered. whatever one thinks of dworkin's work — and boy has she said some ridiculously hyperbolic things — it's pretty digusting to presume that two feminists who criticise the inherent power imbalance in heterosexual sex "could use a good hard fuck," as if their misgivings about sex would disappear if they would only be "completed" by a (surrogate) male penis. just how disgusting is this kind of thinking? the prison guards who gang raped dworkin with a steel rod after she was arrested for protesting the vietnam war (the official version: "cavity search") were probably also of the opinion that she "could use a good hard fuck." (incidentally, the most thoughtful dworkin obituary) this made me think, as i often do, about the current state of liberal politics, one that calls for (in this case) a "sensible" or "acceptable" feminism, one that is deeply distrustful of theory and, more broadly, of academic discourse, and one that, following from the above, caters to the middle class and lives on propaganda and catchphrases. in particular, i thought about howard zinn. when i was in college, zinn came to give a speech (this was post 9/11) and, if he had any insight to share, he kept it to himself. instead, he said nothing everyone in the lecture hall didn't already know — and it's not like he didn't know he was preaching to the converted. for example, he kept speaking in soapbox catchphrases to hear applause the way a celebrity on a late night talk show drops the name of a city. it was as if he was drunk on the adulation, or the consensus, or something equally stupid. students and tenured faculty alike walked out halfway through in disgust, both with zinn and with their colleagues for clapping and barking like trained seals. i have spent the last couple of weeks resuming one of my many incomplete and abandoned projects. last november, i was given a questionnaire on poetics by a brown university student for a graduate seminar project on the state of poetics in contemporary society. that seminar was taught by robert creeley, whose passion on the topic is truly inspiring. having responded quickly to the questionnaire, she gave me a much longer one to fill out. i didn't feel as if i, as a non-poet, had any business answering most of those questions — at least not in a manner that would be productive to the scope of her project — so i never did get it back to her. i did, however, begin to answer those questions from my point of view as a songwriter and, in the process, i gained a much clearer sense of my relation to songwriting. i think it would be dismissive of poetry to claim that poetics is fluid and that it can just as easily be applied to songwriting, visual art, critical theory, etc.; however, i do think that each of these fields has a poetics of its own and it was another student of creeley's who taught me that. before she taught me at reed college, she studied at SUNY buffalo's poetics program, which creeley founded and which, for me, is his legacy — nevermind his tenure at black mountain college or his poetry, wonderful/inspiring/canonical though it is. i've decided to attend the university of rochester's visual and cultural studies program this fall and i have done so in large part because it seemed to me the closest in spirit in my field to buffalo's poetics program, a space where art and criticism break out of their antagonistic roles and come together for the betterment of us all. in tribute to creeley, i will post my answers to the questionnaire, as the poetics of r.mutt, within the next week. until then, In all those stories the hero is beyond himself into the next thing, be it those labors of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death. I thought the instant of the one humanness in Virgil's plan of it was that it was of course human enough to die, yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est. That was Cumaean Sibyl speaking. This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules and the Aeneid, yet all that industrious wis- dom lives in the way the mountains and the desert are waiting for the heroes, and death also can still propose the old labors. — Robert Creeley, 1959 4/13/05 LET'S SOUND LIKE BROKEN RECORDS by now, we're all familiar with my oedipal anxiety towards pitchfork. and, while i enjoy three of their writers (julianne shepherd, amy phillips, mark richardson), two of them are ringers, airfreighted into the pitchfork compound for their cult-crit cred (shepherd is famous for her all-world blog and phillips — one of this world's few owners of the ultra-rare monoculture 7" — is a village voice staffer). over the last couple of years, the other mooks at pitchfork have begun to go cultural criticism with their extra-curricular columns (now mandated by pitchfork's "daily feature") and in their reviews. today's music from the o.c.: mix 4 review is one of the site's less awkward examples of this trend. of course, despite the surprising clarity of the review, robert mitchum misses the barn completely. yes, one aspect of the indie rock/o.c. relationship is the dragging of our "elite" culture into the mainstream and, yes, he is absolutely correct in identifying how acceptable "indie rock" has become (his words: "if you hadn't already realized indie rock moved into an adult-contemporary phase a while back, you're in need of an alarm clock"), but the big issue here is how a supposedly revolutionary culture can be so easily subsumed — as evidenced not only by the o.c. but garden state, one tree hill, etc. etc. etc. — by advanced consumer capitalism (see also: the centipede manifesto). just to provide a little context, the ad next to the review on pitchforkmedia.com shows the logo for prepackaged hipster band louis XIV, some t and a, and the slogan "the best little secrets are kept." clearly, the selling point for "indie rock" in the mainstream as in the "underground" (i use quotation marks because "indie" rockers of this sort are, like the o.c.'s seth cohen, really just john mayer fans copping rivers cuomo's wardrobe) is its secrecy. but the revolutionary agenda of this subculture — one that has nothing to do with death cab for cutie, the shins, bright eyes, et al. — is an emancipation of rock and roll from consumer capitalism. underground scenes aren't clubhouses for well-cultured elites but ethical alternatives to the corporate recording industry. to be fair, mitchum deliberately sidesteps this point — "surely we've all reached the post-modern point where we accept capitalism and don't begrudge our favorite bands for earning their fair ca$h money" — proving that he is aware of it. but this just underscores the fact that pitchfork has profited more than most from the quotation marking of the term "indie rock." from a mirah interview on downhillbattle.org Q Do you ever get the feeling that some indie-rock kids like to keep their favorite music a secret? Or, that they prefer that the music remains within a small, exclusive scene? If I'm not just imagining this, what the hell can we do about it? MIRAH Honestly, I'm just as much a culprit of it as the next guy. I liked the White Stripes too, saw them in Oly a couple times, thought they were really good and then what happened? I heard their video was really neat and I bet I'd like their new album but it's just not as interesting to me to be interested anymore. The popular kids are annoying because they used to be just like you and you maybe admire something about them but that's a total secret and so you have to dislike them instead and who wants that syndrome to destroy the precious relationship you have with your secret music love? Is that an accurate break-down? I'm not condoning this weird psychology but I've never tried to kick the habit either. Maybe we all need some kind of therapeutic process so we can just get over it and revel in the popularizing instead of the disappointment in all that we believe is truly good and deserving of praise. from an exchange in the indietorrents.com discussion forum INTERLOCUTOR 1 They're sooo not at cool anymore. pfft. ; ) [defunct link to time magazine (canada)'s cover story on the arcade fire] INTERLOCUTOR 2 it appears to be about (canadian) indie in general. so by that logic, indie is no longer cool. or wait, was it ever. INTERLOCUTOR 3 TIMECANADA WROTE: Reality check: being the hottest thing in indie music is not like being the Rolling Stones or Prince. (Indie, at its most basic, means nothing more than independent, without major corporate backing. But "indie rock" has come to mean something closer to "stuff you wouldn? expect to hear on normal radio," and it encompasses a wide range of sounds.) That sucks. Some bands just can't help getting thrust into the mainstream with claims that they are pioneering some genre of music. I don't know about you, but I don't really like the mainstream's current attempts to take the mystery out of 'indie'. Like, I remember sitting at the doctor's office (how indie of me) one day and reading the very un-indie Entertainment Monthly (or whatever the fuck) and it had an article name-dropping at least the Shins, Death Cab, and Frou Frou, saying it was the indie music is especially hot right now (so you should like it too) thanks to the help of movies like Garden State. That's just what the article was saying, while completely failing to give me one good reason to go out and check any of these bands out other than it's hot, and Garden State, a good movie, will profit from it, which I don't consider to be good reasons, not to mention not having anything to acutually do with music. ME INTERLOCUTOR 3 WROTE: Some bands just can't help getting thrust into the mainstream with claims that they are pioneering some genre of music. of course they can. if the shins, for example, didn't want to be thrust into the mainstream, they could 1. decline to sell their songs to scubs, the o.c., gilmore girls, garden state, mcdonald's, etc. and 2. they could stop playing such inoffensive and acceptable music. no one ever namedropped merzbow on a WB teen drama. entertainment weekly never called wolf eyes the next big thing. if sonic youth had never made sister and daydream nation, david geffen would not have come calling. i'm not saying any of these career moves are bad decisions, but they are decisions nonetheless. you don't seriously think mainstream recognition just fell into modest mouse, dcfc, the shins, et al.'s laps, did you? INTERLOCUTOR 4 [ I ] WROTE: you don't seriously think mainstream recognition just fell into modest mouse, dcfc, the shins, et al.'s laps, did you? One hypothetical I could come up with is if a famous, super-hot band--like the Strokes right after they broke huge--just keeps namedropping you in every interview. That could get you some attention when you've done nothing to seek it. But that could be deflected easily enough if you just didn't want the attention. I disagree with your claim that they could play something other than inoffensive and acceptable music if they wanted to not be famous. I mean, sure, they could, but the music they play is just the music they play. Whether a band is interesting or bland is a separate argument, I think. ME INTERLOCUTOR 4 WROTE: One hypothetical I could come up with is if a famous, super-hot band--like the Strokes right after they broke huge--just keeps namedropping you in every interview. That could get you some attention when you've done nothing to seek it. But that could be deflected easily enough if you just didn't want the attention. agreed. kurt cobain screamed until his face was blue about how great the raincoats and the vaselines were. it got their records reissued, but those bands didn't want any mainstream attention and they didn't go for it. this isn't to say that they would have achieved it had they tried, but i think every band has a choice whether or not to reach for the brass ring, so to speak. INTERLOCUTOR 4 WROTE: I disagree with your claim that they could play something other than inoffensive and acceptable music if they wanted to not be famous. I mean, sure, they could, but the music they play is just the music they play. Whether a band is interesting or bland is a separate argument, I think. i'm not a big shins fan, but i didn't call them bland and uninteresting. i said they were inoffensive and acceptable, which they are. i'm not begrudging them for it, but the simple fact is that their music is a lot easier to listen to and a lot less disruptive to have playing in the background while you're doing whatever it is you do than most "indie rock" bands. INTERLOCUTOR 4 All of that is true. I guess what I mean is let's say you have an "indie rock band" who doesn't want the attention or fame or whatever. They want to stay "underground," more or less, for whatever reason. They happen to play music that is inoffensive and acceptable. If somehow, despite their total lack of interest in fame--and even distaste for it--they start getting some attention. Incessantly referenced on the O.C., or whatever. They have plenty of things they could do to stay non-famous, but changing their sound isn't one they should reasonably be expected to consider. That's what I was trying to say before. ME they could play less acceptable and more offensive music, but they are by no means under any moral obligation to do so. you're right, they play the music they play. it just happens that it's inoffensive and acceptable. but bands did record more difficult music on purpose. for example, the poster children did that on their major label debut. nirvana recorded in utero with albini after their huge commercial breakthrough. lou reed followed up transformer with fucking metal machine music. INTERLOCUTOR 4 Ah, so I think you got what I was trying to say. I agree. You might also argue that Pavement did that with Wowee Zowee. but, getting back to the important question at hand, just why has it been so easy for this music (and culture) to be subsumed for the ends of consumer capitalism? the most obvious answer is the illusion of it being elite and, by extension, the way it labels the listener of this music, the consumer of this culture, as culturally literate. but even more central to the question is how acceptable the music being subsumed is. the universal music group could overhype yellow swans until they go broke and still no more than 50,000 people would be willing to listen to them (though i suppose many more might, on hype alone, be willing to download or buy their record and never listen to it). as for the stuff that has managed to cross over (modest mouse, franz ferdinand, dcfc, etc.), why has it crossed over? and is it even good music? that's debatable, but it definitely isn't difficult to listen to. it doesn't challenge anyone. and even if, as in the case of modest mouse, the band has a backstory involving fiercely independent labels and active participation in the punk rock underground, this story is not being told. if modest mouse ever stood for anything, they sure don't now. these bands are being dehistoricised (though it might, for their sakes, be best that the tales of their betrayal of the spirit and ideals behind the punk rock underground while taking advantage of the apparatus of the punk rock underground in order to betray it be left untold) and forced into fabricated categories that have only to do with market demographics (e.g. who can tell difference between the manufactured and the non-manufactured bands — i.e. the killers and the bravery vs. the faint and hot hot heat — when they not only all play the same bullshit but are all packaged in the same bullshit fashion?). but i'm not sure if the answer is to produce work that is unacceptable (like, say, the unsubsumable work of yellow swans) so much as it is to produce work that is instructive in the mannner of the early twentieth-century avant-garde (e.g. brecht, duchamp, william carlos williams), work that contains an overt awareness of the means of production and reception. i realise that i constantly repeat the same argument inherited from walter benjamin and the situationist international, but what can i say? it always applies. this time, i'll invoke something daniel buren once wrote that is nicely a propos: art whatever it may be is exclusively political. what is called for is the analysis of formal and cultural limits (and not one or the other) within which art exists and struggles. these limits are many and of different intensities. although the prevailing ideology and the associated artists try in every way to camouflage them, and although it is too early — the conditions are not met — to blow them up, the time has come to unveil them ("critical limits," trans. laurent sauerwein, 1970). in punk rock — though punk rock has been similarly subsumed a handful of times in the last quarter century, i prefer the term to the oxymoronic "indie rock" — movements like the international pop underground and riot grrrl (which fascinated the media, but whose music — their art — implicitly refused to "cross over") and bands like the television personalities, half japanese, oval, and lightning bolt all make music that, unlike interpol, could never be background music on a widely watched tv show like friends. moreover, each of these movements and groups didn't just treat their music as aesthetic objects and, while they all quite brilliantly engaged in pop music on a formal level, their music pushed the limits of what could and could not be considered rock and roll or pop music (or, for that matter, just music) and called into question why people listen to the bullshit they listen to. and, most importantly, their music resonated with the spirit and ideals of the punk rock underground. it said to all the poseurs unwilling to engage with the music on its level: "fuck you, go listen to the pixies." 4/12/05 SOMEDAY BOY YOU'LL REAP WHAT YOU'VE SOWN all day and all night, the billy bragg song "valentine's day is over" has been in my head. there's no significance i can attach to this to flesh out a blog entry and there's really nothing i can say about this other than "curse you, ted leo." if you rearrange the digits in today's date, you'd get 2/14/05: the last of seven times in the last four years i saw ted leo/pharmacists. he stepped to the front of the stage and, in the place of a mic check, sang, completely a capella, "valentine's day is over." at a certain point you'd think any performer, even one as widely adored as ted leo, would get self-conscious in front of all those wide-eyed people after a verse or two, but teddy crooned all four minutes or so of the song and that's what's in my head right now. i'm listening to billy bragg's version on iTunes and — surprise surprise — it's not helping. once upon a time, a song i saw ted leo sing solo was in my head for so long i put out a 7". and while i'm damn proud of that 7", teddy kept flaking (he was busy recording some album called hearts of oak) and, in the end, i had to put out the record without his contribution. he supposedly recorded the song in question — a song someone else wrote — for an e.p. on lookout! records but, due to exorbitant licensing fees, couldn't release it there either. i never did get that song out of my head, though it might be better off confined to my head. i'll try not to be too emo here, but those singularly great moments — in music as in life — are gone when they're over. time and time again i've gotten my hands on a bootleg of an amazing show only to find that what was so great could not be recorded and, for my trouble, a bit of that greatness had disappeared forever. the point that i'm emofully getting to is that these moments are why i make music. bob pollard once said that he would listen to beatles records in his basement and then, guitar in hand, try to top them. i'm not that arrogant; i just try to approximate what is great about these moments the best i can so i'll have something to listen to. for all the music i listen to, and i listen to music constantly through the day, i never quite have the music i want to listen to — because it only exists in the past and the future (or, if i can wax poetic, memory and desire) — at hand. valentine's day is over, it's over. this constant deferment is what keeps me buying records, listening to records, and making records. p.s. i have just finished writing the songs for the follow up to pop songs... and, with nothing but free time on my hands, i'm about to begin recording them. five other songs currently in my head: unrest "teenage suicide" dean wareham and britta phillips "forever" karen o. "hello tomorrow" the dubliners "skibbereen" van morrison "t.b. sheets" 4/07/05 LOOK MARGE, THEY'RE ADVERTISING MY BLOG IN ARTFORUM. IT'S THE FIRST TIME I'VE BEEN MENTIONED THERE... THAT I KNOW OF go here and, using the "edit: find" function, search for "rmutt." then tell me what the hell "They call me Hole-stein. Milk it." is supposed to mean. seriously, i have no idea what's going on. are they making fun of me? or am i their new god? in other, more relevant, news, go here, then click on the "releases" tab and download heavy party's amazing (and free) posthumous album. seriously, i just listened to it five times in a row and it's great. sadly, i only got to see them once, but they, along with channels 3 + 4 and cadeaux, were my favourite band in vancouver. 4/06/05 ARCHITECTS MAY COME AND ARCHITECTS MAY GO AND NEVER CHANGE YOUR POINT OF VIEW sometimes i wonder if this blog isn't just an excuse to diss the people in this world i dislike. this week, it's new york times chief art critic michael kimmelman, you know, the one who jizzed all over the gates two months ago and who once declared matthew barney "the most crucial artist of his generation." two weeks ago, at the opening of the daniel buren exhibition at the guggenheim, kimmelman treaded all over buren for not being pretty enough (exact quote: "These are not attractive."). now i'll reserve judgement on buren's installation until i see it, but kimmelman's dismissal of buren's career, rehashing the well-worn tale of the once revolutionary artist now embraced by the establishment, amounts basically to: who, in the twenty-first century, still cares about reclaiming the spirit, let alone the project, of the historical avant-garde? three more direct quotations: "Regardless of whether 'The Gates' was aesthetic kitsch, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, like Mr. Buren, raise familiar issues basic to conceptualism, but they do so in a form more easily digestible and more broadly applicable to the social and economic politics of culture." "At 67, he has enjoyed a long career as a rather arcane reductivist, settling on tasteful stripes — differently colored but always 8.7 centimeters wide, in paper, fabric, paint or tape — as his trademark." "His present show, with its mirrored installation partly blocking but now also redoubling views of the rotunda, clearly alludes to this storm 34 years ago, an event that is possibly familiar to art historians, but that most people will have never heard of or will consider a tempest in a teapot at best. An antique kerfuffle, it was merely an inevitable clash of chest-thumping egos, each artist wanting to control the circumstances of his presentation in the museum." on the former, i defer to hal foster's "in central park." peinture-sculpture (1971) on the latter two, it is incomprehensible to me that one could be so dismissive of buren's stripes, possibly the most radical breakthrough in visual art since duchamp's fountain introduced the world to the readymade. (for the best account on the radical breakthrough of buren's stripes project, see: douglas crimp, "the end of painting," in october 16 [1981], 69-86.) furthermore, to reduce peinture-sculpture, the high water mark of buren's stripes project, to "an antique kerfuffle" goes against the very foundations of my conception of twentieth century post-war art. whether peinture-sculpture is, today, only known to art historians is arguable; however, it is, even today, almost incomprehensible that duchamp's fountain be declared the most important work of the twentieth century (over picasso's desmoiselles d'avignon and guernica, say) and, certainly, it would have been absolutely incomprehensible before 1985. as an historian of twentieth-century art, i would think that it is almost inevitable that buren's stripes be canonised in a similar fashion to duchamp's readymade, though likely not in such a superlative fashion, in the future. from the guggenheim website: "Buren was invited to participate in the Guggenheim International Exhibition, 1971, which featured a selection of artists whose work represented the 'current state of art.' Responding to a growing interest in site-specific work, the museum's curators invited artists to create work that had a relationship to the building. Buren's contribution, Peinture-Sculpture (Painting-Sculpture), included a 65 x 32 foot striped banner that hung from the skylight to the bottom of the first ramp, bisecting the great space. The monumental work challenged the building's own status as a work of art and its tendency to overshadow the work on view. However, Peinture-Sculpture was removed from the exhibition the day before the opening, following protests from fellow exhibiting artists, who felt Buren's piece compromised their own works by blocking views from across the ramps. The subsequent censorship of the piece ignited a controversy, which played out in a series of articles, reviews, and statements by Buren, representatives of the museum, and artists who spoke out for and against Buren's work." buren's piece, in its examination of frank lloyd wright's spiralling space, called into question the epistemologies of architecture and the museum and brought into discussion an art/design antinomy that currently reigns over contemporary artistic debates. that buren "cried censorship" is beside the point and, certainly, buren's aim was not "to control the circumstances of his presentation in the museum" so much as it was to draw attention to the museum as a framing device. that he obstructed the view of other artists' work from across wright's big empty middle space was no less intrusive than the invisible narration of the museum's curatorial choices and presentation of art works, a position also articulated by buren's contemporaries theodor adorno (in "valιry-proust museum") and michel foucault (in the archaeology of knowledge) and one that presented the fullest realisation of the minimalist project to that point (ironically, it was minimalist artists dan flavin and donald judd who objected to peinture-sculpture). besides, as kimmelman himself brought up, buren — facetiously of course — claimed that dan flavin's lights "colored his banner." this is the same wicked buren wit responsible for blasting wagner over the loudspeakers at the 1980 venice biennale in protest to the german pavilion, which featured politically questionable work dealing with post-war german national identity by georg baselitz (particularly notes for a sculpture) and anselm kiefer. it must be remembered that buren's work came out of the last gasp of avant-gardist revolt the western world has seen. for his part, buren wheat-pasted his signature stripes over advertisements in public space and attached striped sandwich boards to the backs of parisian streetwalkers. after jean dubuffet had become old and irrelevant, yves klein was revealed to be a huckster and a crook, arman had run out of ideas, and jean tinguely became inaccessible even to the theorists, buren was the artist of paris, 1968. his famous work of 1971 took hold of the wright's widening gyre (walter benjamin's angel of history comes to mind) and loosed anarchy (in the proudhonian sense) upon the world. my point in bringing up kimmelman's times review is to show a point of view (and an alternative canon-formation) that academics tend to forget about — or that i, in any event, tend to forget about. i haven't followed kimmelman's career, but his ilk would have it that the radical post-war artists, most prominent among them buren, robert smithson, marcel broodthaers, hans haacke, and sherry levine, each a giant looming over the work of the most widely read academic critics, be written out of the canon in favour of a lineage of their quieter (and often mute, not to mention mostly american) contemporaries: rauschenberg, johns, and, among those whose careers peaked during my lifetime, julian schnabel, jean-michel basquiat, jeff koons, and matthew barney. if we're lucky, they'll toss in an apolitical caricature of gerhard richter for our sake. i said earlier that i can only foresee that buren will be known in the future as duchamp is now, but trust as i do that history will diverge from the taste of kimmelman (as it did, in the last fifty years, from the taste of clement greenberg, barbara rose, and hilton kramer) and remember the art that history should remember, it takes work. and someone has to do it. the times' blurb review of the buren exhibition was entitled "the guggenheim outcast who laughed last" (see also artforum's review). again, i have not seen buren's installation, but i cannot imagine a situation in which he gets the last laugh by getting his own exhibition complete with installation (institutionalising in situ?). this is what i've been trying to keep in mind. when yeats won his nobel prize, the preceding hundred years of english colonial rule over ireland were not erased and, certainly, ireland was not freed right then and there. having declined knighthood in 1915, yeats knew this well. i believe buren knows this too, but his viewers (myself included) would do well to keep this in mind. hype and legitimation (and who, even the most critical among us, is above getting swept up by hype and legitimation?) do not a last laugh make. a guggenheim-endorsed installation is not likely (but, again, i haven't seen it) an institutional critique. it takes work. and someone has to do it. 4/01/05 KEEPING SHIT REAL, OR: THE POLIT/POETICS OF CRITICISM concerned as this blog often is with the topic of selling out, i present you with this rant (his word, not mine) by pop literature superstar dave eggers (EGGERS TEXT). i found what eggers said to be disingenous, especially his collectivising of serious political issues (working for multinational media conglomerates) and being fashionable (wearing a certain shirt) under the umbrella of "keeping shit real." also, while he may have given all of his dirty money away, i don't think it justifies being in bed with time/warner/etc. and i don't think it deals with the underlying systemic issues at hand. the ends (probably unintended by eggers but his employers' ends must be taken into consideration) disqualify the means from being just. and given the parody of themselves the flaming lips have become since the ground-breaking zaireeka and soft bulletin tours, it looks like ol' eggers was wrong. i guess this just makes me all the more thankful that there are people out there with the integrity of my heroes, people like jenny toomey and ted leo in the punk rock world and rosalind krauss and annette michelson in the critical world. i have been thinking about this (and excavating eggers' rant, which is old old news) because i have recently been offered a free ride at the university of rochester's visual and cultural studies doctoral programme. the programme will spit me out with something tantamount to a Ph.D. in art history, but the reason i am seriously considering their offer is the programme's interdisciplinary approach to the study of art and culture. one of the programme's two directors, douglas crimp, was an early editor of october, a critical journal that arose from the shit-keeping-real stances of former artforum associate editors krauss (with whom crimp studied at the CUNY graduate center) and michelson. according to krauss, one the main projects of october was to create a forum for critical debate that, unlike artforum, is not tied to advertising revenue and doesn't have to run reviews (the shows being reviewed are the very same that keep artforum in print with their advertising dollars). without october, we would not have the interdisciplinary critical space in which one could discuss both the experimental work of the flaming lips (i am thinking of zaireeka and the ensuing tours) and high art, or, say, the high pop literature that eggers writes, publishes, and writes about. but, for many, this interdisciplinarity has gone too far. another of my critical heroes, marjorie perloff, conveyed her concerns on this topic in a polemic more or less contemporaneous with eggers' (PERLOFF TEXT). i appreciate perloff's concern with the hijacking of literary criticism for the domain of cultural studies (which she characterises as the scholarship of art for the purpose of historical exempla), and it comes out of the same conditions of cultural crisis taken on by a very different literary critic, louis menand (MENAND TEXT 1), but to stage what is internal to art as antithetical to what is external to it is to reinvoke the authoritarian apoliticism and ahistoricity of the new criticism — i am exaggerating only slightly here. her criticism of cultural studies' reduction of the arts is reductive of criticism. perloff, america's greatest living literary critic though she is in my opinion, has greatly oversimplified the rhetorical/philosophical/historical factiousness in contemporary literary criticism (and, by extension, the "humanities"). on her example about ulysses, for example: Ulysses, for example, was traditionally read as a parodic modern-day Odyssey or as an elaborate experiment in which plot and character are subordinated to the investigation of the possibilities of language. From the perspective of cultural studies, it is seen as a brilliant exposι of colonial subjugation — illustrating, as it does, the fate of ordinary Dubliners under British imperial rule. Or again, Ulysses reveals the "colonial" status as well as the hidden strength of women in the masculinist Joycean universe. any competent scholar would engage the rhetorical (or "poetical") strategies of the novel, its subordination of plot and character to language, within the historical dialogue of england's colonial subjugation of ireland in the early twentieth century, as well as the role of gender politics within this greater dialogue. no graduate student in any english or comparative literature department in the world could not come up with an analysis of joyce's alienating/alienated use of language — namely the english language, that of his colonisers — as an enaction of a conflicted identity formation. here poetics and post-colonialism, which perloff characterises as anti-poetical, come together seamlessly. a meta-textual analysis would yield that joyce himself is conflicted in his use of the english language, given that, historically, poetic language is distinct from spoken language (e.g. latin) but, in joyce's time, english is not only the official language of literature but the official language of the state. add to this the colonisation of the feminine in joyce with the ways in which joyce represents — speaks of — and dialogues — speaks for — his women. i will catalogue what is rhetorical (joyce's use of language in literary production, joyce's subsuming of the generic — plot and character — into language, joyce's representation of women), what is philosophical (joyce's use of language as it relates to identity formation), and what is historical (joyce's use of language and identity formation as it relates to colonialism), but it is a pointless exercise, as there is little to gain from dividing the elements of contemporary critical practice back into its once autonomous master fields. the point, then, of such an analysis (engaging, again, with perloff's terms: the "what-has-happened" and the "what-might-happen"), is to situate the literary "what-might-happen" within the historical framework of "what-has-happened." an ahistorical "what-might-happen" isn't really worth much, is it? however, perloff is right in criticising a trend in contemporary scholarship that treats all texts as equally relevant to historical-critical debates. similarly, eggers was right about our propensity to create hierarchies rather than think critically. this propensity is the same categorically-minded thinking that interdisciplinarity seeks do transcend. but i'm not convinced that eggers himself has thought this out critically. when we demolish the high/low distinction (as well as the distinctions between discrete academic disciplines), it is not to institute a false and, as perloff suggested, unproductive egalitarianism. this would be ahistorical and this is, i think, what eggers was arguing for (he says: "What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand"). eggers commanded: "Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them." two of these three interdicts are dead wrong. it's like saying you can't question authority until you've been in a position of authority — or that i can't criticise a fame-whore pop-lit author's rant to ivy league university students until i've been a fame-whore pop-lit author ranting to ivy league university students. i might be being unfair here: i think what eggers meant to say — or, at the very least, should have said — is not to dismiss a book until you have read (and carefully considered) it, not to dismiss a movie until you have seen (and carefully considered) it. the flaming lips are taking part in commercial culture and working to the profit of multinational corporations; their work is unmistakeably kitsch. eggers' reactions: who cares? but egalitarianism is not about levelling all distinctions; properly instituted, egalitarianism is about erasing the ideological bases that inform our reactions to people, texts, and so on. people and texts should start out with basic inalienable rights and, from there, we are free to criticise them if they make politically suspect decisions. true egalitarianism is about not pre-judging, about judging things on their own merits and not on the a priori categories they fall into, as opposed to not criticising them at all and merely accepting them willy-nilly because "no is for pussies." these debates are all close to my heart and constantly in my head given the academic career path i've chosen. in particular, menand's concerns (MENAND TEXT 1) on the dangers of interdisciplinarity as they relate to the elimination of jobs in the humanities are downright frightening (see also, his new yorker piece on a similar topic: MENAND TEXT 2). however, i find none of the solutions, neither menand's, perloff's, nor eggers', satisfactory. menand and perloff, from quite different angles, arrive at a similar point: that university-level criticism (the "humanities") must maintain its autonomy from the general culture — that is, preserve its license to criticise — but not in the solipsistic (menand says "exclusionary") fashion that it has, to date, been practicising criticism. their points are that criticism should in some way serve the general culture rather than pander to its desires. my criticism of the main thrust of these two essays is that they haven't provided a reasonable manner with which to attempt this "some way." on perloff's appeal to the "true" interdisciplinarity, i fail to see how current critical practice, which i maintain she grossly misrepresents in her essay, differs from this. my criticism of eggers is more broad and it doesn't bear repeating for a third time. i would like to finish with another essay on this topic from roughly the same time period, this one by the aforementioned douglas crimp (CRIMP TEXT). rather than degenerate the humanities into a faux-populistic celebration of privileged objects (nobody but eggers would argue for that), for crimp, the new critical practice — he is referring to cultural studies, though i should add that his conception of the (inter)discipline differs radically from perloff's — must interrogate itself as it interrogates the object of its criticism. for the purposes of this discussion, one must also, in practicising criticism, analyse one's own critical methods and spaces. the title of crimp's essay, following from hal foster's discussion of a thomas crow essay in which he argues that crow gets the warhol he needs, is "getting the warhol we deserve" and, rather than merely engaging with our critical objects ahistorically, rather than manipulating them to fit our critical aims, we must engage with our own critical proclivities. why have we maintained some categories and flattened others? what historical considerations have we taken into account? and, perhaps even more importantly, as we do demolish hierarchies because we find them ideologically-based and politically suspect, we must engage with our own critical spaces, ensure that we ourselves haven't fallen victim to the same or similar ideologies, that our criticism doesn't serve the same or similar ideological interests, or, in the preferred idiom, we must ensure that we ourselves have kept shit real. only then does our critical object truly reveal itself to us. albums r.mutt is listening to at the moment r.mutt's shopping list r.mutt blog archives