conversations

art + nature

Adorno argued that art is where nature is remembered, where the repression and denial of nature is remembered In the early lecture The idea of natural history, Adorno on the one hand emphasizes the importance of breaking through what has petrified into second nature, and on the other the need to see nature itself as historical.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the process of civilization is intertwined with separation from nature, with human being's departure from the immediate restraints imposed by nature. It is through the domination both of inner human nature (desires, needs) and outer non-human nature that human beings have been able to escape nature's immediate hold. This domination is not, however, accomplished without repercussions for human beings themselves. The increasing exploitation of nature in modernity has led to a capitalist society that is just as coercive as nature, itself the object of mastery. Western capitalist society has become a "second nature" exploiting the first.

laughter

In his writings on contemporary culture, Theodor W. Adorno was inclined to treat laughter with suspicion, in particular the kind of laughter generated by popular film comedies and other products of the "culture industry." What received its comic comeuppance in such films, he claimed, was anything opposed to or unassimilable by the status quo; such mirth produced a false sense of liberation masking blind conformity to a cruel social order. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment he glumly observed:

In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its
worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity. What is fiendish about this false laughter is that it is a compelling parody of the best, which is conciliatory. Delight is austere: res severa verum gaudium.

Laughter is often a mask for cruelty.

Mars: gullies + crater

This image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite shows the wall of a crater in the Northern Lowlands that has several gullies incising it.

NAS, Gullies Incising a Crater Wall

How gullies are formed on Mars is unclear. Mars is globally covered with permafrost, where soil temperatures are permanently below the freezing point of water. Therefore, any water present in the Martian soil or atop the soil surface must be in the form of ice.

improvisation

In the twentieth century music was held to be autonomous, its own discourse within the field of reason governed by its own laws and not determined by some other realm, economics for instance. However, these laws gradually ruled more and more things taboo until what was easy and natural had to be abandoned and replaced with what was difficult and unpleasant. This trajectory cost classical music in Europe not just it’s audience but also its social effect, this music ceased to be at the heart of the culture.

It is s also claimed that music and art are sovereign, that they can exceed the bounds that reason sets them, they can be transcendent, and make the infinite present. This is the revolutionary potential of art and music. However the terms of autonomy and sovereignty have fallen into disuse, and the intellectual position of the arts and music is irrationality as art and music as become a commodity. If what art and music generate are new things, and if capitalism has already appropriated the irrationality of music, then it has also appropriated this productivity. What of free improvisation?

Noise and Capitalism (Mattin +Anthony Iles eds) is a collectively written book that seeks to explore the tension that exists within Noise and Music.It is based on the premise that the practice of improvisation in itself questions the foundations upon which intellectual property is based, such as: authorship, rights, restrictions, property, and the division between production and consumption. Improvisation and noise distribution, with their hardcore DIY (do it yourself) aesthetics, indicate alternatives to the mainstream means of production and distribution of music.

Eddie Prévost presents free improvisation in music as an alternative cultural form to the normal music in contemporary capitalism. The two features of normal music against which improvisation is distinguished are the score (produced by the creative genius of the composer) as the notation determining performance, and composition and rehearsal as the point at which the technical problems of musical production are resolved in advance of performance. Improvisation eschews both. Hence the oppositional or resistant techniques and practice of improvisation.

John Tagg on documentary photography

In his Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning Jonathan Tagg refers to the issue of documentary photography. He argues that there can be no more talk of a continuous documentary tradition grounded on the non-manipulative use of this camera’s supposed natural properties.

...if there is a link between documentation and “documentary,” that link is now seen to come not via the pristine camera but via the institutions, discourses, and systems of power that invest the camera and sully it, and via the regimen that holds the document in place. What links document to “documentary” is not a natural continuity founding a seamless tradition but, rather, the uneven history of photography’s implication in the purposeful institutionalization of boundaries to meaning: boundaries drawn only through a processof conflict and negotiation in which—contrary to the claims of the truth machine—nothing is guaranteed in advance; boundaries that specify photography’s singularity only at the price of multiplying it and dividing it.

The history of documentary is the history of a strategy of meaning forwhich reality is not only a complex discursive effect but also an effect of power that returns its own force to the struggle to control the social Weld.

Realisms, by definition, claim to ground themselves on a finality that ends all dispute. Thus, they have never been able to brook the endless, open play of meaning that marks the contingency of the social and undoes all attempts to give a final fixity to social reality:

In order to be effective, the timeless truths of realism have to be timely, since it is always within particular historical frames of discourse that effects of meaning are produced, mobilized, and enforced. Realisms are thus always specific and conjunctural: activated in specific historical frameworks,determined by specific representational resources, and effective only as specific historical rhetorics.

art history + social history of art

In the Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning Jonathan Tagg refers to returning to the vague topography that came to be so confidently colonized as “the New Art History.” In the mid-1970s in Britain, however, this uneven terrain seemed less like a consolidated territorythan a scattering of would-be no-go areas signposted by the names of often mutually hostile journals and places: Screen, Screen Education,Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Block, Old Compton Street, Birmingham,Leeds, and so on. He adds:

At the time, those moving in these disjointed spaces, far from art history’s marbled halls, also sought to rally themselves with their own thoughts of affirmative return: to Karl Marx and to Sigmund Freud, certainly, but also to Antonio Gramsci, to Bertolt Brecht, to the Russian formalists, to Ferdinand de Saussure, and sometimes to Melanie Klein or to Simone de Beauvoir. These were returns for which the tours all departed from Paris, where the tour guides of choice were Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and, only much later in Britain, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray. There was no shortage of divergent and sometimes misdirected paths. Yet what is striking in the case of the dissenting art history of this period is that, whether for tactical reasons or not, all these different tracks came to be represented as converging somehow on the road of return to a singular site with a singular name: the social history of art.

This is the journey that I made. The“social history of art” became, for a time, the name of a radical homeland,a place of secession: “the place,” as T. J. Clark put it in his Image of the People,“where the questions have to be asked, and where they cannot be asked in the old way.”

Tagg adds that:

What was evident from the beginning, however, was that this place of return was far from a comfortably settled landscape and its occupation would bring its own conflicts. On the one hand, the social history of art constituted a wary return to the territory of Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser, Francis Klingender, the young Meyer Schapiro, and, less familiarly, Max Raphael, since this proving ground of early Marxist art history was seen by many as offering the only available space of resistance in the history of the discipline to formalist criticism and art historical connoisseurship. On the other hand, the social history of art as reconceived in 1973 also marked a belated attempt to encompass what were still seen in Britain as new developments in Continental theory. Conflict erupted because what came through the door with this term “theory” led to an undermining of the intellectual framework and humanist commitment of the older formation of the social history of art and even, in the end, to the erosion of any notion of a unifying oppositional problematic.

In pursuing the multiple avenues of poststructuralist analysis, certain directions for critical art history had entered an intellectual terrain that would sooner or later have to be recognized as entirely incompatible
with any sociology or social history of art, of culture, or of knowledge. Herein lie some of the deeper conflicts and striking political realignments of the discipline in subsequent decades.

My position in this is that the problem of how to give an account of cultural meaning that would counter “formalism” by opening the process of signification beyond itself to a sense both of its constraints and of its effects, without, however, falling into the snares of earlier functionalist and deterministic sociologies of art. This was the context for the making of common cause under the temporary banner of the social history of art.

Grateful Dead: Halloween show at Radio City 10-31-80

The Grateful Dead perform Uncle John's Band during the famed Halloween show at Radio City 10-31-80. An MP3 file of the concert. A video of Franklin's Tower from the same concert can be found in an earlier post.

The Radio City Music Hall in New York is located in the Rockefeller Center and is a venue for live entertainment and celebrity showcases. These shows were the final two nights of a run that began with 15 concerts at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, continued for two more at the Saenger Center in New Orleans, and ended with 8 nights in New York.

According to the Live Grateful Dead Music Blog:

The Radio City Music Hall concerts are legendary because of the bands return to playing acoustic for the first time since 1970. Each show featured 3 sets, beginning with an acoustic set followed by two electric sets. All 25 shows were recorded for two live albums, the acoustic Reckoning (which is fantastic by the way) and electric Dead Set. Because of this, audience taping was forbidden which made life difficult for tapers who had to go stealth.

Though the acoustic set is seen as the highlight some of the songs from the electric set are pretty good.

cloud computing

Charles Leadbeater in Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations for the British Council says that the combination of mass self-expression, ubiquitous participation and constant connection is creating cloud culture, formed by our seemingly never-ending capacity to make and share culture in images, music, text and film.

The rise and spread of the internet and the world wide web are first and foremost a cultural phenomenon. Their impact will be felt first in culture and only later in politics and commerce. The web allows more people than ever to create and make content; distribute and share it; to form groups and conversations around the ideas and issues that matter to them, which shape and express their identity and values. The current expression of that process – Web 2.0 – began to emerge in the late 1990s, created by social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, blogging and wikis. The next phase of that process will turn on a distinctively different kind of internet, the rise of cloud computing, which will allow much greater personalisation and mobility, constant real-time connection and easier collaboration...The next most likely stage of the web’s technical development – cloud computing – will act as a giant accelerator for cultural cloud formation. It will be like a giant machine for making clouds of culture.

He adds that the net we have grown up with was based around data and software stored quite close to where it is used on personal and mainframe computers. That gave people a sense of ownership and control, exploiting cheap local storage because the bandwidth to download data from remote sources was too expensive and unreliable. The net was a way for us easily to link these disparate and disconnected machines, with their separate data and software.

However, in the world of cloud computing our data – emails, documents, pictures, songs – would be stored remotely in a digital cloud.We should be able to access our data from anywhere, thanks to always-on broadband and draw down as much or as little as and when we need. Instead of installing software on our computer we would pay for it only when we needed it:

Sharing our programs, storage and even data makes a lot of sense, at least in theory. Pooling storage and software with others should lower the cost. Cloud computing would turn computing power into just another utility that we would access much as we turn on a tap for water..When computing becomes merely a utility we plug into, the focus for innovation will shift to the demand side...The cloud should also encourage collaboration. Different people, using different devices should be able to access the same documents and resources more easily. Work on shared projects will become easier, especially as collaboration software and web video conferencing becomes easier to use.

The web has already had many incarnations. Once it was thought of as the digital superhighway. Others have likened it to a frictionless market. In the last decade the social and networked features of the web have come to the fore. In the decade to come it is likely that the cloud will be the most persuasive and powerful metaphor, to link both technical developments in how computers and the internet work but also to understand its cultural impact and significance.

In this world you will be defined not just by what you own but by what you are prepared to share and how much effort you put into making it easy for others to share with you. It is not just what you do but how you link with others that counts.

Lessig on the war on piracy

In Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy Lawrence Lessig argues that copyright is, critically important to a healthy culture. Properly balanced, he says, it is essential to inspiring certain forms of creativity. Without it, we would have a much poorer culture. With it, at least properly balanced, we create the incentives to produce great new works that otherwise would not be produced.

However, the costs of the “war” on “piracy,” is deemed to “threaten” the “survival” of certain important American industries. Peer- to- peer file sharing is the enemy in the “copyright wars.” Kids“stealing” stuff with a computer is the target. The costs of this war wildly exceed any benefit, at least when you consider changes to the current regime of copyright that could end this war while promising artists and authors the protection that any copyright system is intended to provide. He adds that:

I’ve tried to advance this view for peace by focusing on the costs of this war to innovation, to creativity, and, ultimately, to freedom. My aim in The Future of Ideas was to defend industries that never get born for fear of the insane liability that the current regime of copyright imposes. My subject in Free Culture was the forms of creative expression and freedom that get trampled by the extremism of defending a regime of copyright built for a radically different technological age.

His focus has shifted since. He now asks us to consider the following question:

In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will to them seem natural?.....What should we do if this war against “piracy” as we currently conceive of it cannot be won? What should we do if we know that the future will be one where our kids, and their kids, will use a digital network to access whatever content they want whenever they want it? What should we do if we know that the future is one where perfect control over the distribution of “copies” simply will not exist?

Lessig adds that the solution to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously. At least when the war is not about survival, the solution to an unwinnable war is to sue for peace, and then to find ways to achieve without war the ends that the war sought. Criminalizing an entire generation is too high a price to pay for
almost any end. It is certainly too high a price to pay for a copyright system crafted more than a generation ago.

He adds that this war is especially pointless because there are peaceful means to attain all of its objectives— or at least, all of the legitimate objectives.

Artists and authors need incentives to create. We can craft a system that does exactly that without criminalizing our kids. The last decade is filled with extraordinarily good work by some of the very best scholars in America, mapping and sketching alternatives to the existing system. These alternatives would achieve the same ends that copyright seeks, without making felons of those who naturally do what new technologies encourage them to do.

There is a need to redefine the system of law and regulation we call copyright so that ordinary, normal behavior is not called criminal. Ordinary, normal behavior here is remix ----Photoshopping images or making music. Most music is derived from previous ideas. And that almost all pop music is made from other people’s source material. The changes to the current regime of copyright are the Creative Commons licenses that shift the copyright baseline through the voluntary acts of copyright holders.

California Saga: California

I didn't know much about the Beach Boys' Holland album (1973) other than this was their last creative effort before they collapsed into a oldies/nostalgia band and that Brian Wilson had become merely a shadow presence.

This is one track from the album by Al Jarden. It sounds okay.

It is a song about a particular place as it is part of a three-part ode to California that can be seen as a song cycle. The trilogy titled "California Saga is Holland's centerpiece.