Category Archives: theory

Blogademia / Craig Saper

Academics are not publishing their most valued thoughts about new media–the ones for which they hope to obtain tenure or promotion–in new media.

Jay Bolter (Writing Space, second edition, 111)

There’s something about this medium that convinces us that our merest flights of fancy, our wispiest free-floating musings, are Revealed Truths, outtakes from Thus Spake Zarathustra. . . . the chattering class’s presumption that it must have something, anything to say about everything? (Joan Didion famously said that she left New York because she didn’t have an opinion about everything.)

Mark Dery blog (September 27, 2005)

Via Reconstruction

Jay Bolter is an American new media specialist who has published Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999) . Mark Dery (born 1959) is an American author, lecturer and cultural critic who authored one of my favorite quotes on culture.

In the illusory babels of language …

Babel by Doré

“In the illusory babels of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge… but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures… at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.” –Robert Smithson, 1968

Bio-Lit-Crit

Madame Bovary’s Ovaries : A Darwinian Look at Literature (2006) – David P. Barash [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Adultery in literature is a theme I first explored after having seen the French film Jules et Jim (1962). It suddenly occurred to me that a number of classics in European literature deal with female infidelity. Among them are The Scarlet Letter, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Ulysses (come to think of it, these were all written by male authors impersonating as it were, female protagonists). While searching for these terms I came across a review of Madame Bovary’s Ovaries : A Darwinian Look at Literature (2006) which deals with the representation of human nature in literature. Having a perennial interest in thematic literary criticism, would Ovaries provide useful pointers? I’ve been combing the web on the subject, but haven’t found anyhing yet. Has someone published a taxonomy of human nature as it is presented in narratology? A list which includes love stories, adventure stories, … etc with their number of variations? Maybe some of the poststructuralists?

Would works such as Jean-Pierre Richard’s Littérature et Sensation (1954) Horst Daemmrich’s Themes and Motifs in Western Literature be an answer to my question?

An interview with Dennis Cooper

I just cleaned up my Kathy Acker page and came across this 1996 interview with American author Dennis Cooper. If you read Dennis ‘s blog you will understand why his work is generally classified as transgressive fiction.

From the interview:

Q:
There was this group of writers during the 70s and 80s called “New Narrative.” Steve Abbott and Kevin Killian among them. How do you fit in with them? How are you different? What is the New Narrative all about?
DC:
No one ever figured it out. There was a group of people, but there was never anything to be involved with. People started to characterize that group of people that way. I mean, I like all those people, including Bob Gluck and Dodie Bellamy. I like all their work. I think that it never went anywhere because no one could figure out what it was. Steve Abbott invented the term. All the work was independent and experimental I guess, and it’s somehow involved with autobiography in a funny way. We all like each other’s work. Sometimes, Kathy Acker is in the group, and sometimes she’s not. And sometimes Lynne Tillman. It’s a real blurry category. There is this new book coming out about New Narrative, this year. It’s an academic book, so maybe they’ll tell us what it is.
Q:
Is it like the Nouveau Roman?
DC:
Except that the Nouveau Roman is a little bit more specific. They at least had a credo. I don’t think we have any credo. Nouveau Roman writers were all interested in the objective voice. Wasn’t that their thing? I always thought that they were like that at the beginning. They all gave up on it. All of them sold out, or became better. I think that you’re right: they’re a little more alike then we are. I may be wrong. Maybe it’s not for me to say.
Q:
I read recently a letter you wrote to Kevin Killian. I guess you were writing Closer at the time. Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis had come out and you panicked. Could you talk about that?
DC:
Where did you read that? At Kevin’s house? It was published? Oh yeah! It freaked me out. It was weird. It came out and all of my friends said “Don’t read this book, because it will really freak you out, because he writes so much like you” So I didn’t read it. Then I finished Closer. Then I read it, because I was finished with my book, so I figured whatever. And I was really freaked out about it. Now I see the difference, but at the time I thought “Oh, this kid has done all this stuff that I’m doing, and this book is a big success, and my work is so artsy compared to this.” I started to get weird. It really did freak me out. It seemed serious. When I read it, I thought that this was a serious book. There had never been a book like Less Than Zero. He did capture a certain thing. I was certainly impressed with it. Consequently, I have no interest in him at all.

What’s interesting of Acker and Cooper is their interest in French literature and French theory. One of my theories is that the course of 20th century philosophy was — I’ve sort of said this before with regards to American art criticism– as follows: After WWII, French theory, which was about to become the hippest on the ‘scene’ (see existentialism) was very much infatuated with the German philosophers of the pre-WWII era. And then subsequently American Academia fell in love with French academia (poststructuralism, postmodernism, third wave of feminism and deconstruction).

While I was in Amsterdam I asked the people in a philosophy bookstore: “If Slavoj Žižek and Sloterdijk are my two favorite philosophers, who would the third be?” They came up with Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Alain Badiou.

Of Enzensberger I know nothing.

Of Alain Badiou I know that he teaches at European Graduate School, the most ‘postmodern’ university in the world, and I found the following quote over at my site:

Alongside new developments in European horror films, there are also significant developments in their theorisation, such as the application of work by Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek, Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou. —source

1001 things to do before you die

The mid 2000s saw the process of listmaking coming to the fore with titles such as 1001 Movies (2004), 1001 Paintings (2007), 1001 Books (2006) and 1001 Albums (2006) [you must] see, read and hear [before you die]. I like to think of Jahsonic as an addition and alternative to these lists, with particular attention to what I call a certain ‘cult’ factor. For film I propose 250 films and their directors; for literature 120 books and their writers; and for music a history of dance music and a history of black music, a history of experimental music and their makers. In the visual arts I have fantastic art.

Did Bach find Coetzee, or did Coetzee find Bach?

 

Stranger Shores: Literary Essays (2001) – J. M. Coetzee
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

In an essay entitled ‘What is a Classic?’ Coetzee includes commentary on his early confrontation with the classics, and the political direction it might have lent him. Taking a cue from Eliot’s 1944 lecture of the same title [in which Eliot asserts that classic status can be known “only by hindsight and in historical perspective.”], Coetzee speaks of the classic in this way: “What does it mean in living terms to say that a classic is what survives? How does such a concept of the classic manifest itself in people’s lives?” This statement brings the classic from its supposed transcendental realm into the hurly-burly of history and makes it amenable not to passing fashions but to the sustaining values of each epoch. Whatever survives history’s ephemera, ‘that,’ according to Coetzee, ‘is the classic.’

In the first moment of aesthetic rapture upon hearing Bach, Coetzee muses: was the spirit of that culture ‘speaking to me across the ages … or … was [I] symbolically electing high European culture, and command of the codes of that culture, as a route that would take me out of my class position in white South African society … of what I must have felt … an historical dead end? (10-11).

The novelist and essayist—now Nobel prize winner—JM Coetzee, in his provocative essay, ‘What is a Classic? A Lecture’ considers the possibility that we may read for self-centred, pragmatic reasons: the drive for economic and social power. He re-examines his first contact, as a young man, with a classic musical text which he felt, he says, ‘was speaking to me across the ages, putting before me certain ideals.’ Later in his life, he interrogates his response sceptically, wondering whether he was, in fact, ‘symbolically electing high European culture, and command of the codes of that culture, as a route that would take (him) out of (his) class position in white South African society?’ He puts the question succinctly: ‘Was the experience a disinterested and … impersonal aesthetic experience or was it really the masked expression of a material interest?’ In his essay, Coetzee finally draws away from this sceptical account of his motives, but the doubt placed at the centre of the essay compels our attention. — Hermina Burns via http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s1308292.htm

Amsterdam

I spent a couple of days with D_______ in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is about 200 kilometers from Antwerp.

Books are my thing these days and my first stop was Kok antiquarian books, where I found Axel’s Castle by Edmund Wilson; a German non-fiction book on popular literature called Trivialliteratur (1981) by Peter Domagalski; Robert Darnton’s excellent The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), a Dutch book titled Verboden boeken (1989) (Eng: Forbidden Books).

I got to see Oldboy, the second fim I saw by Korean director Park Chan-wook in his vengeance trilogy (I still have to catch Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). Just as a couple of months ago, I was very much impressed. It’s a film by a man who is locked away in a private prison for fifteen years without knowing why. When he is released he is contacted by the man who imprisoned him and the quest on why he was imprisoned begins. The film is sufficiently bizar and rather poetical (“when a man laugs, the world laughs with him, when a man cries, he cries alone”). Park’s films are unlike anything I’ve seen in European or American cinema over the last years, combining the spirit of European countercultural cinema of the 1960s and 1970s (a critique of Asian post-industrial society) with the transgressions of 1990s Japanese cinema (think Audition and Tetsuo). Chance would have it that a novel by Sylvia Plath (I’m reading The Bell Jar at the moment) is featured in the film (by a character who appropriately later commits suicide). Over at Wikipedia the film is described as Sophoclean tragedy because it has incest as plot element.

The Frans Hals museum:

The Monk and the Nun (1591) – Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem

This particular painting is an illustration on how the clergy has been satirized in the history of art and literature in a genre that today would be called somewhat irrevently ‘nunsploitation‘, but which can be traced to the 17th century epistolary novel Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669) and in the visual arts to the work above.

Image sourced here. (follow link for a nice compilation on the naked breast in art)

We went to the Frans Hals museum where I saw a couple of paintings by Goltzius, Van Heemskercke and Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem which were to my liking. Though Hals has been attributed as being a precursor to impressionism because of the hasty brushwork of his latter period — and a generally acclaimed artist — I wasn’t much impressed with Hals’s work, which mainly consisted of portraits of the elite of Haarlem. In the museum shop I found the amazing photorealistic paintings by Pieter Claesz.

Vanitasstilleven met nautilusbeker en pomander aan een gouden ketting (1636) – Pieter Claesz

Introducing Castrovalva

I have just stumbled upon a new blog: Castrovalva by a certain Richard R..

From the introduction:

The fulminations, peregrinations and ruminations on this site are the work of someone who would call himself a pragmatist, distrusting metaphysical concepts in favour of the existential, but I’d also describe myself as a romantic, fascinated by decay, decadence, the skewed and the exotic. I would call myself an outsider, but distrust the very term, since the very idea of rebellion and non-comformity is the basis of modern culture and comes complete with its own brands and uniforms. I am a pessimist and sceptic, though this has only ever stemmed from disappointed idealism. I would call myself a traditionalist, revering the literature, art and architecture of past decades and centuries while remaining contemptuous of the modern. But I also feel nothing but contempt for conservatism and would call myself a liberal. I would call myself an atheist, though not a rationalist. To be strict, I would call myself an agnostic, in that although I consider god’s existence highly unlikely I am concerned less with this than with the social and ethical aspects of religion; I became an atheist after reading the Book of Revelations, and being horrified and revolted by it.

At present this site is comprised of three main sections. The first is a gallery of architectural and historical photographs. The tenets section contains a set of observations and notes, combining a journal and commonplace book as well as including impressions of art galleries, museums and books. As an extension of this, there is now a weblog, called The Thief’s Journal. For links and articles, there is also my del.icio.us pages.

From a July 2006 post concerned with individuality [external links changed/added]:

Of late, I’ve been reading two very different texts that share several themes in common. The first of these, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, a survey of alienation in romantic and existential literature. As a work of criticism it tends to be somewhat reductive, seeing anomie as a byproduct of thwarted mysticism, a somewhat difficult theory to approach the post-christian likes of Camus and Sartre with. Accordingly, Nietzsche in deflated to a religious mystic while the moral questions that so excised Bakhtin in his reading of Dostoevsky are declared an irrelevance.

Derrida on Youtube

Padraig points us in the direction of some wonderful Youtube footage of/on Derrida. I especially enjoyed this clip about a visit Derrida paid to Prague, and was framed by the police on account of drug charges. He felt as if the spirit of Kafka had come back to haunt him. Padraig’s post is appropriately tagged hauntology, this moment’s buzzword. In French a ghost is called a revenant, someone who comes back.

A revenant in the Middle Ages was an animate corpse which rose from the grave to haunt the living. Many stories were documented by English historians in the Middle Ages, as examplified by William of Newburgh who wrote in the 1190s “one would not easily believe that corpses come out of their graves and wander around, animated by I don’t know what spirit, to terrorize or harm the living, unless there were many cases in our times, supported by ample testimony”. Stories of revenants were very personal, always about a specific individual who had recently died (unlike the anonymous zombie depicted in modern popular culture such as Night of the Living Dead), and had a number of common features.

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.”