Category: tPA 4

Cultural Dreams

Jeff

We live in the age of the image.
Today, no other realm of culture displays so much power
than that of the image.
Words, music, literature,
books, newspapers, rock’n roll, theatre…
nothing comes even close
to the authority of moving images, in cinema and television.

Why is it that today, not only in Europe,
but all over the world,
“going to the pictures”
is synonymous with
“seeing an American film”?!

Because the Americans realized long ago
what moves people most
and what gets them dreaming.
And they radically implemented that knowledge.
The whole “American Dream”
is really an invention of cinema,
and it is now being dreamed by the whole world.

I don’t want to discredit this,
but merely ask the question,
“Who is dreaming the European Dream?”
Or better: How are we encouraged to dream it?

Wim Wenders, “Giving Europe a Soul?”

Lately, I’ve become obsessed with “regionalism” as an artistic movement of the late 1930s (Grant Wood, et. al. + the Federal Writers Project). The thing that most people call “American” is actually more of a function of the cultural values of hot spots such as California and New York, or even Texas. These values don’t necessarily coincide with the vast majority of the country. The agreement on what “American” means (for better or worse) is a function of mass rather than local medias.

This hasn’t always been the case. Regionalism is usually branded as “thinly disguised nationalism.” The arc towards a “European Dream” subsumes the “regionalism” of the nation-states involved; it’s the end of regionalism all over again. But I think its loss comes at a dear price, it’s ultimately the death of the local in favor of the “general.” This general perspective is the property of those who talks the loudest or acts the rudest, rather than any sort of true consensus—such “universal” agreement seems impossible.

But most significantly, I think, we lack an awareness of just what a “local” media might entail. America had that in the newspaper explosion of the late nineteenth century, but lost it with the advent of mass media.

Gluck

Jeff

Morality vs. Truth by Gluck

I was searching for pictures of lions or tigers jumping through hoops (for a presentation) and stumbled on an image that seemed more like my academic progress—a picture of a snail poised to leap through a flaming hoop. It was by Gluck. I was never able to find a high enough resolution image to use (or even post for that matter), but the concept intrigues me.

Gluck seems like quite a fascinating character, there’s some info on her wikipedia page as well as a memorial, and a nice set of other images on a site I can’t read.

Stand-up Theorist

Jeff

Jim Pomeroy, stand-up theorist, 1945-1992.

The technological watershed of the 80s initiated the inexorable merging of media that served to commodify “information” and “knowledge” as visual. Representation, the representable, the symbolic, the imaginary, the real, and the true, became sites of contention during that decade. For the art world, the discourses of visuality became crucial to delegitimating the image as anything but ideologically situated. For the electronic industry, the opposite strategy was evolving; the image wasn’t discursive, it was unquestionable. Video games, computer graphics, digital photography, image enhancement altered the way images were experienced as well as how they were recorded, produced, and transmitted. Fetishized technology has come to obscure the roots of the historical production of knowledge. The violence and shock of the political montage of the 1920s has been replaced by the aesthetieization of shock in the media of the 1980s. Novelty has dislodged substance.

Rooted in Heartfield’s disruptive montages, Höch’s (re)imag(in)ing of subjectivity, Brecht’s “refunctioning” of theatre, and provoked by Herbert Marcuse’s critique of technology, Marshall McLuhan’s quotidian glohal village, and Jean Baudrillard’s nihilistic euphoria, the work of “stand-up theorist” Jim Pomeroy emerges.

Continue reading “Stand-up Theorist” →

The Battle

Jeff

I am sorry to hear of your ill success with the 2 doz gel. plates. The plan of the battlefield should not be altered in the way you suggest—the gelatine line should be advanced, but the gelatine Colonel should be represented as not quite up in his tactics—when he has allayed his thirst and looked carefully over his book of tactics he will return to his faithful plates soldiers and the condition of things will be as per in No 2. — I have tried Cramer & Nordens 8×10 cut in two and find them good, free from defects and about 6 times quicker than wet. Yrs W.H. Metcalf

This excerpt of a letter from W.H. Metcalf to H.H. Bennett (c. 1879) just cracks me up. Who knew that photographic emulsions had strategies?

Happiness

Jeff

Forty portfolios to grade, and then the semester is done. Perhaps I can lay off the seven-day weeks after that. I had to shut down comments and trackbacks because I didn’t even have time to keep the spam in check.

S.C.

Jeff

Following the notice of the capture of the S.C.s, gambling in public printed in the Evening Standard, an anonymous member of the Sketch Club (which included Samuel Morse and William Cullen Bryant) responded in a letter to the editor:

My dear sir:— I am exceeding grieved to perceive by your paper of this morning, that you have fallen into an enormous error respecting the nature and objects of the Selebrated Cociety to which I have the honor to belong, and the existence of which is occasionally made known to the public through the press, by the apparition of its formidable initials, S.C. You appear to be somewhat alarmed at the portentous aspect of this prodigy; but, my dear friend, let me entreat you to calm your fears—there is no cause for uneasiness. We, S.C’s, are not gamblers; and we entertain as virtuous and laudable a horror of Lumber Street and its inequities as any of our fellow countrymen. How should it be otherwise? Are we not Sober Citizens, and Sincere Christians? Do we not Sleep Coundly, Sing Cheerfully, Separate Coberly, Speak Censibly, Suffer Courageously, and Sup Comfortably? You seem to think we Shuffle Cards, too; but upon the Spotless Character of an S.C., it is not so; and the main who says it utters a Scandalous Calumny.

Since you manifest so much anxiety on the subject, however, I will tell you the honest truth; we are, in fact, a Secret Combination of Sworn Conspirators; and Social Conviviality is but a Simulated Cover for the Sacred Cecrecy of our Solemn Cabal. We are Severe Colts; and our purpose is to outroot Jacksonism and the Republic together. We are pledged to the establishment of absolute monarchy, the U.S. Bank, and Anti-Masonry; and we have sworn the downfall of the Regency, the Cherokees, and the odious practice of making visits on New Year’s day. We have Seriously Concluded to have mister. Van Beuren for King, and Mr. Clay Viceroy over him; but Mr. C. must change his name to Stephen, that he may be,

Like your Sensible Correspondent,
For all intents and purposes, an
S.C.

qtd in Historical Annals of the National Academy of Design, 1865

Epigraph

Jeff

A new age does not begin all of a sudden.
My grandfather was already living in the new age
My grandson will probably still be living in the old one.

The new meat is eaten with the old forks.

It was not the first cars
Nor the tanks
It was not the airplanes over our roofs
Nor the bombers.

From new transmitters came the old stupidities.
Wisdom was passed on from mouth to mouth.

“New Age,” Berfolt Brecht. Poems 1913-1956 (New York: Methuen, Inc., 1976), p.386.

Priceless epigraph from Like a Razor to a Razor Blade Company by Jim Pomeroy— a remarkably accurate article about technology from 1984.