Category Archives: postmodernism

Eno on Can

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErXSlbJseo]

Although once described as not requiring real effort in a Curt (Groovy Age) interview, the practice of choosing Youtube clips requires knowledge and patience. So it is with great pleasure I present you this brilliant clip of musician/artist/theorist Brian Eno on German Krautrock band Can. The source of this clip is as of yet unestablished.

Speaking of Groovy Age, guest editor Jaakko is doing a series of posts on Terror Blu, a previously unknown (to me at least) Italian fumetti series. Jaakko has also what appears to be the largest online collection of fumetti available.

This is obscene art

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAIIogcH49I

LUX – The Chapman brothers at Tate Modern.

Lux is a television show on culture presented by my youth hero Luc Janssen. His radio show Krapuul Deluxe was highly influential and he has been described as Belgium’s answer to John Peel. Recently, Janssen has fallen out of favour, especially since an interview I read with him in De Morgen where he said something stupid about the identity-creating-capabilities of owning a Le Corbusier chair.

Enoch Soames and proto-pomo-lit

My brother’s recommending the short story “Enoch Soames“, and the anthology above looks like a nice place to read it in. The story is well-known for its clever and humorous use of the ideas of time travel and pact with Faust. Another good place to read it would be The Book of Fantasy (1940), an Argentianan anthology edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. A site dedicated to Hunter S. Thompson has this:

Published in 1979 by St. Martin’s Press, this collection edited by Duncan Fallowell contains a number of stories, including “The Dinner” by Thomas Love Peacock, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe and “Enoch Soames” by Max Beerbohm. Hardly the kind of works you would expect “The Heat Closing In” by William S. Burroughs to be surrounded by. HST [Hunter S. Thompson’s] part is called “A Night on the Town” , the part from FFLV [Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas] where HST describes his encounter with an acid guru, when he lived near Michael Olay. —www.gonzo.org

More on Duncan Fallowell:

Over the years he has worked extensively with the avant-garde music group Can whom he first met in Cologne in 1970. It was in St Petersburg that he recently wrote the libretto for the opera Gormenghast, inspired by Mervyn Peake’s trilogy, the music for which has been composed by Irmin Schmidt, Can’s specialist in keyboard and electronics. They have also written many songs together. —source

See also drugs in literature.

The breeding of money

Donald Kuspit on contemporary art in Artnet:

By way of introduction, I want to quote some lines from the tenth and final Duino Elegy of Rainer Maria Rilke. Describing the “booths” in a fair — let’s call it an art fair — “that can please the most curious tastes,” he asserts that there’s one “especially worth seeing (for adults only): the breeding of Money! Anatomy made amusing! Money’s organs on view! Nothing concealed! Instructive, and guaranteed to increase fertility!”

I will suggest that the irrational exuberance of the contemporary art market is about the breeding of money, not the fertility of art, and that commercially precious works of art have become the organ grinder’s monkeys of money. They exist to increase the generative value and staying power of money — the power of money to breed money, to fertilize itself — not the value and staying power of art. —Donald Kuspit

Such is the state of feminism that it forces one to defend lame movies

… post in progress …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHjPFO-1t5c]

I watched My Super Ex-Girlfriend with my kids and liked it. Probably too lame to be called a sleeper, which is a term that Danny Peary uses to define a future cult film, in his Cult Movie Stars. Although lame, you may enjoy the allegorical representation of early 20th century Western sexual mores. Part of the fun was watching it with my daughters after my eldest (12) had picked it up at our local video rental store. Its interesting connections are movie ratings around the world and issues of contemporary feminism. Be warned though, some of you may find this an incredibly stupid film. To start the discussion, here is an article by Udolpho.com.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend… When I read Slate “reviewer” Dana Stevens’ deranged put-down [this tale of male sexual panic, you breathe a sigh of relief: Thank God we don’t really live there. Or do we?] of My Super Ex-Girlfriend as “grim misogyny“, I knew I would have to see the comedy that inspired her grim diatribe. And yet I also knew that the movie probably wasn’t going to be any good. Such is the state of feminism that it forces one to defend lame movies. —Udolpho.com

Regarding the film certification on its adultness: In the United States the film was rated PG-13 (children under 13 can attend but need special guidance by parent or guardian) but in Germany and the Netherlands is deemed suitable for children aged 6 and above. American mainstream film critic Michael Medved noted that the “PG-13 rating” was inappropriate (due to several sex references and depictions) and that the movie should have had an “R rating” instead.

On its potential cult status (a financial disaster at the box office is a criterium of a future cult hit):

The film has been viewed as a financial disaster according to Box Office Mojo, as the film took in a mere $8.6 million on its opening weekend and has made $22,530,295 domestically, and $54,882,045 worldwide as of November 19, 2006.

As an allegory of early 21st century sexual mores:

  • portrait of Jenny as a needy, desperate, bitchy and clingy woman
  • depictions of zero-tolerance policies of sexual correctness at work

P. S. You may have noticed that I finally learned how to insert YouTube films into my pages. Some of you may have had problems with inserting the films (I know I’ve had). Here is the code:

“open square brackets youtube=paste youtube link here close square brackets”.


					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Jean Baudrillard died today
			

								


				

			
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, cultural theorist, media theorist, situationist, post-structuralist and one of France’s leading postmodern thinkers, died today in Paris at the age of 77, his relatives said. He was the last survivor of the fab four of French PoMo (the others being Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze and  Jacques Derrida), and a wonderful prose poet. The only living French philosopher I can think of who continues to write in the tradition of Baudrillard is Paul Virilio.


 	    		




Baudrillard satirized.


Text: “Yes, hyper-scepticism. Intellectuals must stop legitimizing the notion that there is some “ultimate truth” behind appearances. Then, maybe, the masses will turn their backs on the media and public opinion management will collapse.” –Baudrillard


The cartoon is from “Postmodernism for beginners” by Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, an Icon Books book.


Update, March 11 2007:


British gulf war.jpg


The Gulf War Did not Take Place


 


9/11 attack on America 


New York, Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacs on th WTC.




My interest in Baudrillard is very much related to his statements on hyperreal mediatizations of the 1990/1991 Gulf war and on the 2001 terrorist attacks on the WTC.



Update March 12, 2007:


					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				The end of the sexual revolution
			

								


				

			
    


  In the Cut (Unrated and Uncut Director’s Edition) (2003) – Jane Campion [Amazon.com]  [FR] [DE] [UK]   


 In the Cut, of course, continues Campion’s career-long examination   of female masochism.    


   


  In the Cut (1995) – Susanna Moore

[Amazon.com]  [FR] [DE] [UK]  


I’m halfway through Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel In the Cut, the story of a thirty-something literature teacher in New York City with an interest in street slang who falls in love with a cop of whom she suspects he may also be a serial killer/psychopath. There are lots of similarities here with Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which I read last year. Can both be categorized as chick lit? If yes, this kind of chick lit takes it upon itself to study men’s (sexual) behavior in an almost anthropological way. Moore describes how a post-coital man, Erica Jong described one of her lover’s post-toilet behavior. 


So far I liked Jane Campion’s film adaption of In the Cut better, Moore’s prose is kind of trite and Moore lacks the philosophical breadth I liked in Fear of Flying.  


What In the Cut and Fear of Flying also share is the concept of women’s sexuality after the sexual revolution, a topic I’ve first mentioned in my profile of Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977).


Speaking of the end of the sexual revolution which oficially arrived in 1984 (cfr. TIME cover) and which coincides with the arrival of AIDS (see Benetton AIDS ad) and of postmodernism: many writers of the pre- and sexual revolution era such as  Gershon Legman, Wayland Young (Eros Denied), Gordon Rattray Taylor and Amos Vogel (Film as a Subversive Art) foreshadowed utopia as soon as we would get rid of our sexual inhibitions.


I quote from Jim Haynes’s website[1]:


 


“Murder is a crime; describing murder is not.          Sex is not a crime. Describing sex is. Why?” –Gershon Legman.


“If we were sexually liberated there’d be no president, no police          force, no night sticks, no governments.” –Germaine Greer.


The utopia did not happen because of the aforementioned AIDS epidemic and what I suspect a whole range of reasons. Personally I like the concept of inhibitions, the concept of taboos, the concept of shame and guilt; not only are these inhibitions what makes sex exciting in the first place but I suspect that they are necessary to regulate a society. If these inhibitions would not be there life would be an eternal recurrence of the orgy in Perfume.  Maybe I should read this?


The only writer that comes to mind who has dealt with this subject is Camille Paglia.


 Well, um, what I’m saying is that I’m part of the sexual revolution, um, and I feel that the…in one of my most controversial sentences is “Everybody who preached free love in the 60’s is responsible for AIDS.” I mean by that the Mama’s and the Papa’s and all of us, so, the price of that revolution has been paid by gay men, primarily. I think that what we’re understanding is the enormous power of nature. Even Larry Kramer is starting to talk like this now: that nature apparently did not want us to be promiscuous and that it puts a thousand obstacles in our paths such as these diseases. OK. I feel that procreation is nature’s law, and that’s why I defy nature, I resist it, I oppose it. OK. I think that women certainly are in the..um, you know we were the first generation to have the birth control pill, OK, which frustrates nature. […] –Camille Paglia interviewed by Jack Nichols, 1997


But of course there must be other literature out there, and if you know of any, I’m looking forward to your recommendations.






					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Sir Stephen gave her his consent
			

								


				

			


L’Histoire d’O / Story of O (1954) – Pauline Reage [Amazon.com] 


I’d never paid attention to it, but Pauline Réage’s 1954 novel Story of O betrays its ‘literary fiction’ (as opposed to genre fiction) antecedents by a metafictional streak; the novel has two alternative beginnings and endings. Postmodernism avant la lettre.


After the novel is two pages underway the narrator steps in and announces:


“Another version of the same beginning was simpler and more direct:  the young woman, dressed in the same way [as in the first opening of the story], was driven by her lover and an unknown friend.”


Likewise, the author provides an alternative ending which is rather macabre:


“In a final chapter, which has been suppressed, O returned to Roissy, where she was abandoned by Sir Stephen.


 There exists a second ending to the story of O, according to which O, seeing that Sir Stephen was about to leave her, said she would prefer to die. Sir Stephen gave her his consent.”


Notice the secretive “a final chapter, which has been suppressed”. Very Borgesian.


P. S. I am currently reading the Dutch translation by Adriaan Morriën who adds an interesting afterword to his translation of this classic, which was written before the true identity of the writer of O was known. He notes that the women in Story of O are not slaves without rights but that their permission and consent is sought for everything they undergo. He also notes that apart from the first 10 pages the narrator steps out of the way to give an account seen through the point of view of O herself. The novel, he says “does not provide a philosophy nor a way of life but rather a description of human relations that are conceivable.” But this reminds me very much of what Poe said in 1850:  “The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed.” Aury could not have written this novel without living the story first.


Sort of off-topic: staying with the subject of sadomasochism in fiction, Il Giornale Nuovo has a nice post on the graphic work of Bruno Schulz, a man primarily known for his modernist fiction. This image tells most of the story.

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Coffeetablishness
			

								


				

			


GillesNeret


Gilles Néret (1933 – 2005)


In answer to my recently asked question regarding the publishers of 20th century counterculture Taschen came to mind, an international publishing powerhouse with its roots in 1980s Germany. Taschen started out by publishing Benedikt Taschen’s extensive comic book collection and then basically conquered the world with its ‘coffeetablishness’.


Taschen is the best alternative to countless hours of internet browsing and a much better reading experience than the web itself, but buying the books remains more expensive than the internet.


Taschen also illustrates the lack of political subversion in contemporary culture. Countercultural publishers  such as Grove in the 1960s also published pamphlet-like tracts. Taschen does not have a politics section; however I like to think that Benedikt and Laure have opinionated views on these matters.

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				New figurative art
			

								


				

			
By new figurative art I mean art since about the 1980s which depicts people in a realistic/fantastic way. Another term for this kind of painting might be “new pictorality” (see below), examples of which are John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Odd Nerdrum. The term figurative art was coined after the acceptance of abstract art in the early to mid twentieth century. Before that, all painting was figurative (notable exceptions by Whistler and near-abstract work by Turner notwithstanding).  I think I first became aware of the power of allegory by seeing — at Art Brussels — a painting of a man in a trench coat weeping: out of his handkerchief came tears, these tears formed a puddle at his feet, which subsequently became a brook, a river and finally to the right of him: a waterfall. A terribly funny picture. Humor is one of the things I appreciate most in contemporary art. It’s wonderful when a painting has the power to make you laugh out loud. 


What follows is a review by Matthew Rose of a travelling exhibition (Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt) entitled “Dear Painter, Paint Me…”. The superscripted links are image links. 


The age-old profession of applying paint on canvas may have simply been overshadowed by the plethora of art strategies begun as early as 1917, with Duchamp’s “Fountain,” the overturned urinal signed “R. Mutt.”  Interestingly enough, Duchamp’s very good friend, Francis Picabia, was a tried and true painter, although his approach to the canvas was anything but conventional. The flamboyant French artist (1879-1959), immensely talented and outrageously brazen, mapped out a world of tongue-in-cheek kitsch works in a prolific explosion that spanned the middle parts of the 20th century.  


Picabia’s late work from the 1940s [1] [2], the fulcrum of this exhibit, borrowed generously from soft-core pornography and other photographic sources, and does more than inform the direction these artists have taken. Combining the comic, kitsch, popular culture and adding a jigger or two of surrealism, Picabia undoubtedly had a great deal more influence on pictorial subject and style than he’d ever dreamed. 


 “Dear Painter, Paint Me…”, (the title taken from Martin Kippenberger’s 1980s series) is a travelling exhibition (Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt) turns the spotlight on contemporary figurative painting since the Frenchman’s heyday painting pin ups in the 1940s. 


 Among the 18 artists in this expansive show, modern figurative masters such as Alex Katz, Luc Tuymans and even the droll French outcast Bernard Buffet, are complemented by the sexy and often grotesque contemporary worlds of John Currin, the surreal pop worlds of , and the dreamy romantic ones of Elizabeth Peyton. Kippenberger [1, nsfw], a strong influence on the group, is well represented, as are a handful of single-minded, dyed-in-the-wool painters of a younger set: Kai Althoff, Glenn Brown, Brian Calvin and Peter Doig. Sigmar Polke, perhaps the most Picabian of the group, appears with several mid-1960s masterpieces, works that are funny, skilful and acid, laying bare the bones of 20th century man (and woman). –Matthew Rose via http://www.art-themagazine.com/pages/paris14.htm [Dec 2006]  


American art critic Craig Owens (1950 – 1990) and new pictorality:   


 One of the key texts about this new pictorality of pictures was Craig Owens‘ ‘The Allegorical Impulse’ published in 1980, then propagated in the central organ of postmodern esthetics, the ‘October’, founded in 1976. Owens is offering six notions, to catch on to the new complexity of pictures, which, following the then rather trendy Walter Benjamin, he summarizes in the title ‘allegorical’, (the only one outdated notion in Owens’ conceptuality is, accordingly, this collective term). –THE PICTORIAL IMPULSE Rainer Metzger, 2004 via http://www.maderthaner.cc/maderthaner.texte/pictorial_impulse.htm [Dec 2006] 


Quotes from  The Allegorical Impulse: 


 “This deconstructive impulse is characteristic of postmodernist art in general and must be distinguished from the self-critical tendency of modernism. Modernist theory presupposes that mimesis, the adequation of an image to a referent, can be bracketed or suspended … When the postmodernist work speaks of itself, it is no longer to proclaim its autonomy, its self-sufficiency, its transcendence; rather, it is to narrate its own contingency, insufficiency, lack of transcendence.”