Category Archives: art
Ballardian psychogeography
K punk has an analysis of an interview with Iain Sinclair by Tim Chapman which touches upon psychogeography, the art of the 20th century flâneur.
Of all the intriguing moments in Tim Chapman’s fascinating interview with Iain Sinclair over at the ever-excellent Ballardian (Sinclair so much more arresting and engaging as a commentator and critic than as a novelist, where writerly obsurantism fogs over all his insights and sharpness), this is one of the most telling: —k punk
The Valley (1989) – Burroughs/Haring
Via American author Dennis Cooper’s blog, comes:
“”The Valley” is a group of etchings by Keith Haring with text by William S. Burroughs. The portfolio consists of sixteen etchings drawn by the artist in April of 1989, in his New York studio. ” –Dennis Cooper
“There is no way in or out of the Valley, which is ringed by sheer cliffs with an overhanging ledge. How did the people of the Valley get in there in the first place? No one remembers. They have been there for many years. Children have been born, grown up and died in the valley, but not many children. Food is scarce. A stream runs through the Valley, and they have dammed up a large pond to raise fish. There is an area along the stream where they raise corn. Sometimes they will kill birds, a few lizards and snakes. So most children must be killed at birth. Just an allotted number to continue the line.” –William Burroughs
The installments can be found here, here and here.
Tip of the hat to Georges Bataille.
Update:
From the Dennis Cooper website:
“Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer” – William Burroughs
“In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper’s books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe… This is high risk literature”
– The New York Times
Underground
Parent: underground – philosophy of place – culture
By medium: underground film – underground literature – underground press – underground music
“Ideas enter our above-ground culture through the underground. I suppose that is the kind of function that the underground plays, such as it is. That it is where the dreams of our culture can ferment and strange notions can play themselves out unrestricted. And sooner or later those ideas will percolate through into the broad mass awareness of the broad mass of the populace. Occulture, you know, that seems to be perhaps the last revolutionary bastion.” — Alan Moore
Related: alternative – banned – censorship – clandestine – controversial – counterculture – crime – cult – drugs – economy – forbidden – grotto – hidden – illegal – illicit – independent – a glossary of the non-mainstream – overground – prohibition – resistance – secret – subculture – subversive – taboo – transgressive – underworld – The Velvet Underground
Contrast: mainstream
Underground mining station, image sourced here.
A basement or cellar is an architectural construction that is completely or almost below ground in a building. It may be located below the ground floor.
The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground. – Frank Zappa
Interconnected underground stems are called rhizomes
Bibliography: Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of 20th Century (1989) – Greil Marcus – Outsiders as innovators (1998) – Tyler Cowen – Notes from Underground (1864) – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Rationales for movie sex and nudity
Found a good article titled Rationales for movie sex and nudity:
“To avoid the charge of presenting scenes involving “gratuitous sex and nudity,” Hollywood filmmakers often suggest a reason (or at least an occasion) for their stars’ behavior, offering various rationales for movie sex and nudity during each decade of the twentieth century.”
In many ways this phenomenon was also apparent in European art from the Middle Ages until the 1850s. But the rise of modern art and the related rise of realism in the arts in France changed all that. Artists no longer wished to hide behind artistic pretexts to represent nudity and eroticism. An important example of this is Manet’s Olympia.
The modernist movement and the cult of ugliness
“The modernist movement is still dominant in literary culture, especially the post-World War II idea that a fiction is worthless unless everything ends badly. But a lot of science fiction and fantasy literature doesn’t end this way, because the books are based on the conflict of good v. evil [see Stephen King’s The Stand], and end with the triumph of good. —RM Vaughan, Weekend Post commenting on the release of, A Feast for Crows, the fourth of seven planned novels in A Song of Ice and Fire, an epic fantasy series by American author George RR Martin.
Exploration of art as a commodity
Google video, a Marxist view on the modern art world.
The video (a conference paper by John Mitchell) features Alan Woods and is based on Alan Woods’s 2003 paper Capitalist fetishism and the decay of art:
“The cheap and nasty pop culture that capitalism produces in its phase of senile decay plays approximately the same role as the cheap and nasty fast food that is undermining the health and clogging the arteries of the present generation of youth. The only difference is that this “pop art” is undermining culture and clogging the mental arteries of society. It is hard to say which activity is the more harmful. “
Another example of the censor pointing the way to interesting art.
See also: commodity fetishism
Rephotographing Atget
Rue de la Colonie (1900) – Eugène Atget
Image sourced here.
Via gmtPlus9 (-15) (a blog which combines old weird america music with modernist art) comes a project called Rephotographing Atget:
Lens Culture… Rephotographing Atget – photos and text by Christopher Rauschenberg.
On a 1989 trip to Paris, I suddenly found myself face to face with a spiral-topped gatepost that I knew very well from a beautiful photograph by Atget (the photograph on the left). I rephotographed his gatepost from memory (the photograph on the right) and wondered how many other Atget subjects might still be holding their poses.” Also… Paris: Eugène Atget and Christopher Rauschenberg, and exhibition at the International Center Of Photography which ends on the 27th. — gmtPlus9 (-15)
It reminds me of a similar project involving the New York re-photographs of Berenice Abbott by MrJumbo.
The Chelsea Hotel (1936) – Berenice Abbott
Image sourced here.
The Chelsea Hotel (2000) – MrJumbo
a 2000 mimic of a Berenice Abbott photograph by MrJumbo
Image sourced here.
That there are more links between Atget and Abbott is attested by:
In 1925, Abbott discovered the photography of Eugène Atget and helped him gain international recognition for his work. —MrJumbo
And:
Fellow photographer Berenice Abbott is given much credit for the recognition which Atget’s photographs received after his death in 1927. One year before his death, Abbott, then an assistant to Man Ray, met with Atget and conserved many of his negatives. When Atget passed away, Abbott raised enough money to acquire 1,500 of his negatives and 8,000 prints. She spent the next forty years promoting his work in America, elevating it to be recognized as art, above its original reputation as simply photographic documents. In 1968, Eugene Atget’s work was collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Berenice Abbott has commented regarding Atget: “He was an urbanist historian, a Balzac of the camera, from whose work we can weave a large tapestry of French civilization.”–Wikipedia [Jan 2006]
In search of the roots of impressionism
Garden in Shoreham (1820s or early 1830s) – Samuel Palmer
Samuel Palmer (1805 – 1881) was largely forgotten after his death. In 1909, large amounts of his Shoreham work were destroyed by his surviving son Herbert Palmer, who burnt “a great quantity of father’s handiwork … Knowing that no one would be able to make head or tail of what I burnt; I wished to save it from a more humiliating fate”. The destruction “included sketchbooks, notebooks, and original works, and lasted for days”.
In search of photographic realism
Detail of the The Birth of Venus (also known as Aphrodite) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879.
In Plato’s Symposium the speech of Pausanias distinguishes two manifestations of Aphrodite, represented by the two stories: Aphrodite Ourania (“heavenly” Aphrodite), and Aphrodite Pandemos (“Common” Aphrodite). These two manifestations represented her role in homosexuality and heterosexuality, respectively. –via Aphrodite’s Wikipedia page [Aug 2006]
In his own time, Bouguereau was considered to be one of the greatest painters in the world. In 1900, his contemporaries Degas and Monet reportedly named him as most likely to be remembered as the greatest 19th century French painter by the year 2000. Although with Degas’ famous trenchant wit, and the aesthetic tendencies of the two Impressionists, it is possible the statement was meant as an ironic comment on the taste of the future public.