conversations

representing industrial ruins

The relationship between photography and industrial landscape has a long history. As early as 1959, Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing the disappearing industrial architecture in Germany, and over the next forty years continued to document numerous blast furnaces, water towers, boilers, storage silos and warehouses in Europe and the United States. Apart from being a striking record of an industrial past on the brink of erasure, their work established and consolidated a particular photographic gaze that contemplates the industrial as sheer form.

In Industrial Ruins Spaces, Aesthetics and Materiality Tim Edensor argues for the value and sensuality of the fragment rather the historically reconstructed whole. He remarks:

The disparate fragments, juxtapositions, traces, involuntary memories, inferred meanings, uncanny impressions and peculiar atmospheres cannot be woven into a eloquent narrative. Rather like the nature of a ruin, the stories about it must similarly be constituted out of a jumble of disconnected things, occurrences and sensations. Ruins are disarticulated spaces and language can only capture their characteristics through halting speech. Bits of stories suggest themselves and trail away into silence. As an encapsulated narrative, the telling of the ruin’s tale from beginning to end is impossible, for such a story must be open-ended. Suggestions about the people, their characteristics and the activities they carried out are multiple yet obscure, but despite this, the enigmatic traces that remain, their ghostly presences, invite us to fill in the blanks.

He traces the forgotten forms of collectivity and solidarity, lost skills, ways of behaving and feeling, traces of arcane language, and neglected historical and contemporary forms of social enterprise’.

The imagery and aesthetics of the con- temporary industrial ruin are mainly exploited through the cinema and in some of the marginal realms of popular music, although ruins are also used by contemporary painters, photographers and sculptors, and in some contemporary writing. Representations of industrial ruins are
woven into popular culture, typically serving as stage sets for cinematic portrayals of dystopian futures, spectacular action, dissident identities and nostalgia for the demise of socialities based around heavy industries; all forms of depiction which testify to popular conjectures about the characteristics of the contemporary city and its future.

Will Steacy: Down These Mean Streets

In "Down These Mean Streets" Will Steacy wanders through battered urban areas with a big camera (Canham 5x7 field camera with a 4x5 back on the camera) taking these images of abandoned buildings, burned-out cars, neon signs and local residents. An interview.

Will Steacy, Detroit 2009, from Down These Mean Streets

In this article at Conscientious Extended he says:

The camera is a beautiful gift from the gods that allows me to ask questions, open doors to places I would never explore otherwise and to see the world with brave curiosity. Memories of my childhood and questions about why America has allowed its inner cities to crumble without any means to repair themselves are the roots of the bud that was nurtured by the 2008 presidential campaign, economic and housing crisis and a trip to Baltimore that became the tree I call Down These Mean Streets.

Steacy routinely walks between the airport and central business districts of each photographed city, focusing on the part of town one might drive through but not to.

The photos depict an America that has turned its back on cities, as years of neglect have left crumbling neighborhoods with no local economy, a public education system that barely meets requirements, a low income housing nightmare, and few options for proper nutrition and health care as violence and drugs reign making survival a number one priority.

Naomi Oreskes on 'Merchants of Doubt'

A talk by Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science, on her new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly—some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole.

Alex Brun on a mash-up culture

Alex Brun in his Distributed Creativity: Filesharing and Produsage--a chapter in the Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss (ed) collection Mashup Cultures edited by Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, argues that bootleg filesharers play an important role in creating and co-curating a worldwide cultural archive which is too valuable to leave to that cesspool of fraud and corruption which we know as the music industry.

The music and movie industries, amongst others, see their established positions threatened by the rise of user‐generated content. The internet, he says, affords podusers:

an equal chance to have their message heard – has simply amplified the existing cultural activities of independent fans and artists to an extent that they now stand side by side (and sometimes overshadow) the cultural output sanctioned by conventional publishers. Artful, clever, or simply funny mashups, news about which is spread by word of mouth, may now attract as much or even more attention as the original source material which they draw from, comment on, or send up. This is a trend that is by no means limited to artistic pursuits, of course – the rise of citizen journalism has been built on its ability on occasion to provide more insightful commentary and more fruitful discussion than conventional news publications...; open source software is seen to be more stable and reliable – and much cheaper – than many commercial products; the Wikipedia has become the world’s preferred source for encyclopaedic information in less than a decade ....

The technological support for such independent activities in the form of Web 2.0 and social media has enabled these activities to no longer take place in isolation, but can be aggregated – that groups of participants can pool their resources, coordinate their efforts, and develop central platforms from which their outcomes can be disseminated to the wider world.

He adds:

Collaborative efforts to engage in creative, artistic mashups can be described as a form of distributed creativity: they are projects which harness the creativity of a large range of participants to build on and extend an existing pool of artistic materials. Such projects include ccMixter, the music sharing site operated by the Creative Commons group: here, individual musicians (more recently also including a few of the more progressive artists in the mainstream, from Nine Inch Nails to Radiohead) are able to upload their own recordings under an appropriate Creative Commons licence which allows other members of the community to build on their work by adding further instrumental or vocal tracks, remixing the material, or using it in other ways in their own compositions (Stone, 2009). The site provides the functionality to track such re‐use, making it possible for users to trace the artistic genesis of the complete song from a single violin solo to a fully‐ featured ensemble piece, for example – performed and produced quite possible by musicians who have never met in person.

These community efforts at collaborative content creation form part of the wider phenomenon of audiences becoming more visibly and more thoroughly active in creating and sharing their own content than ever before.

'All reification is a forgetting’

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer write ‘All reification is a forgetting.’

In How Modernity Forgets this cryptic remark is unpacked by Paul Connerton. He says:

Marx and others after him.... quite frequently speak of forgetting, and when they use the verb to forget as a synonym for what they write about in technical vocabulary as fetishism or reification, and in metaphorical language as defective vision, they are perfectly aware of this alternative linguistic usage and of what they mean by it. So they write that the commodity seems enigmatic because people forget how it was produced; or they say that people forget that the origin of profit is in the surplus value extracted from human labour; or they insist upon the fact that the human agency that creates manufactured objects gets forgotten; or they draw attention to the fact that the more concentrated and extensive city markets become the easier it is to forget the ultimate origin of the things that are bought and sold there. It is quite legitimate, therefore, to redescribe the process most frequently diagnosed as reification or the fetishism of commodities as a process of forgetting.

Those glossy, high end Apple computers that are displayed in fashionable shops are made by cheap Chinese labour.

Clay Shirkey: on publishing

In this interview at Salon.com Clay Shirkey talks about the future of the book, the reader and the writer:

We have this whole complex of words, "publish," "publisher," "publicity," "publicist," that all refer to either jobs or the work of making things public. Because it used to be incredibly difficult, complicated, and expensive to simply put material into the public sphere, and now it's not. So I'm comparing it to literacy -- literacy used to be reserved for a specialist class prior to the printing press, and, much more importantly, prior to the spread of publishers and the rise of a real publishing industry.

In order to show what he means by "publishing is the new literacy" Shirkey refers back to:

what happened to literacy in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s is that it went from being reserved for a specialist class to being a general feature of the middle class. The same thing is happening to publishing -- the ability to put something out in public is becoming more important to society, but the delta between "I can put something out in public" and "I can't put something out in public" is no longer so great that you can automatically make money simply by having access to the means of publication.

This is self-publishing---on blogs, Flickr, YouTube, books etc---that is easy to do because of the new publishing platforms take the publishing technology out of the hand of the corporate publishers.

This is a a technological change whose ramifications are mostly cultural with culture lagging the technology:

So the ability to publish, the ability to put things in public no matter who you are, as long as you have access to, again, a public library or an Internet cafe -- that's a technological change. But the change in perception and reaction to what gets published and why, that's the cultural change.

The culture is resistant --the dark side of the internet. Shirkey adds that:

if there is any intrinsic value in writing or expressing yourself or taking a photo, it's worth doing even if the results are mediocre. Whenever the production maw has opened more widely, whether it's cheap photography or it's weblogs, the average quality falls. The average quality of a piece of writing is now lower because the denominator has exploded. The question becomes how do you find the good stuff in this much larger group. I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed. What's interesting now is that the old gatekeepers for identifying, anointing, and promoting talent are different in this generation than they were previously

This is true about the quality in the public sphere for blogs and photography but it is a form of digital populism.

photographers + blogging

Live Books have done a survey on photographers and blogging. The key findings are:

» Nearly 50% of creative professionals have a blog
» WordPress is the most popular blogging platform with approximately 56% of creative
professionals using WordPress to house their blog
» Nearly 50% of creative professionals believe the trickiest part of setting up a blog is
getting it to look and feel like their websites - a concern that is naturally more prevalent
in the mind of people who ‘get’ branding than the norm
» Of the creative professionals who don’t have a blog, about one-third said it was because
a blog was too much of a time commitment - trust me - we understand!
» Approximately 85% of creative professionals spend less than 3 hours per week creating
and managing content for their blog
» 92% of creative professionals spend less than 3 hours per week planning and promoting
their blog content
» Nearly two-thirds of creative professionals with a blog have seen an increase in traffic to
their website and 42% have received leads from their blog

So blogging as a sales tool rather than a contribution to cultural discourse is the modern style. Culture has been collapsed into the market.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu

Gurrumul performing 'Wukun' in a live and exclusive set for ABC Dig Music's 'Intimate Evening' sessions at the ABC's Melbourne studios:

His first album is entitled Gurrumul and it is on the Skinnyfish Music label. The compositions are sparse with soft delivered vocals over the top of a soft acoustic guitar and a double bass only. It is the powerful and melodic voice that fills out the sound.

"Bapa" (Father)

This is quality music.

the old aesthetics

I've started reading online The new aestheticism (Manchester University Press) edited by John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas. Here are some notes I've made from the introduction.

The image of cultural conservatism can be identified as the old-style academic aesthete sitting in his (and it was always his) ivory tower and handing down judgements about the good and the bad in art and culture with a blissful disregard for the politics of his pronouncements. The old style aestheticism assumes that art is a ‘privileged realm’ which exists at a non-cognitive remove beyond history, and it works with categories such as aesthetic independence, artistic genius, the cultural and historical universality of a text or work, and the humanist assumption of art’s intrinsic spiritual value.

This position has been subject to criticism that shows art's contamination by politics and culture. Art is inextricably tied to the politics of contemporary culture, and has been throughout modernity. Despite the mass media's bemoaning the decline of traditional values, it is difficult to argue that aesthetics is anything other than thoroughly imbricated with politics and culture; or to argue for any sort of rearguard defence of, or case for a return to, the notion of art as a universally and apolitically humanist activity presided over by a benign council of critical patriarchs.

What has emerged to replace the complacency of the old-style aestheticism anti-aestheticism of recent cultural theory that dispenses with traditional aesthetic categories, thereby foreclosing on the possibility of a more rigorous engagement with the historical processes by which such categories continue to be ‘critiqued and renewed’ in the light of art's contamination by politics and culture.

The starting point here is that the aesthetic has remained irreducible within modernity, and thus has appeared in a range of different guises always as a ‘surplus’ (an autonomous art) to the organising drive of instrumental reason.

Grateful Dead: Birdsong

An acoustic Birdsong from the Radio City Music Hall (New York) run of 1980. It was featured on the Reckoning album (1981), which I haven't heard.

This version is from the 10/31/80 Halloween show. It begins rather sloppily --no Phil Lesh bass--and the recording (by a member of the audience) is bumpy in places--but the crowd is enthusiastic. The acoustic performance picks up around the 6th track--'It Must have Been the Roses'.

The group opened these special concerts with a special acoustic set at which Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir played acoustic guitars, Brent Mydland played piano, Phil Lesh electric bass, and drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart played reduced kits.

Birdsong was followed by Ripple. In the electric set we have a sprightly and energetic Franklins Tower.

The acoustic music deliberately harks back to a period of the band's origins in the folk, bluegrass, and country groups. Though Garcia was the most comfortable with this roots music the band always spoke with a distinctly Western American voice, distilled from American roots of folk, blues, bluegrass, and honky-tonk prior to their esoteric jazz-inspired improvisational runs and the subsequent turn to western-style country music using acoustic guitars and Garcia on pedal steel guitar.

DIY publishing

Sean O'Hagan has an article in The Guardian on self-publishing by photographers with the democratization of publishing technology. With a decent PC and the right desktop publishing software, you can create a printer-ready book in digital form. Professional layout software such as Adobe's Indesign is relatively expensive though.

O'Hagan says that there are two touchstones for the self-published photography book the artist's book, of which Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) is a famous and highly influential example, and the fanzine, a labour of love and obsession that came of age with the punk movement of the late 1970s and has spread to embrace every aspect of popular culture, photography included.

Ruscha, who made 16 artist's books between 1963 and 1978, said later: "When I first became attracted to the idea of being an artist, painting was the last method; it was an obsolete, archaic form of communication … I felt newspapers, magazines, books, words to be more meaningful than what some damn oil painter was doing.Today, though....zine culture seems to be the prime driving force behind the self-published photography book, with many being no more than pamphlets. Whether making an artist's book or a zine, self-publishing is primarily to do with keeping control of your creative vision (the book doesn't just illustrate the art, it is the art) and being able to operate outside the often prohibitively costly mainstream publishing houses. Ironically, the self-published book, which is produced in such limited editions, often becomes a collector's item, and the price rises accordingly.

He adds that In the continuing digital age, then, the future of the DIY photobook seems assured for perhaps the same reasons that independent record labels currently continue to thrive as major labels falter.

The message seems to be that small is not only beautiful, it's also cost-effective and creatively liberating. In today's fragmented pop culture, some of the most interesting and challenging developments still happen on the margins, where the mainstream fears to tread----self-publishing.

However, if like me, you start off with no experience with design, or with fonts, file formats, scanning, color correction, reproduction requirements of various printers, you have set yourself a gigantic task to master Indesign. It does seems counter-productive to learn all you would need to know about the program to just do one book. Self-publishing has a strong do-it-yourself tradition, but sometimes it’s quite a bit smarter to get somebody else to do-it-themselves.

Old and in the Way

Old and in the Way were a contemporary blue grass group of the mid 1970s that included Jerry Garcia, Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements and David Grisman. Their debut album Old and in the Way was released in 1975.

This reunion concert had Herb Pedersen replacing the late Jerry Garcia (banjo) and Bryn Bright replacing John Kahn on the bass.

Old and in the Way's interpretation of the Rolling Stones classic on their Sticky Fingers album is from the original 1975 album:

The musical roots of fiddler Vassar Clements and guitarist singer Peter Rowan were in Bill Monroe's Blue Grass band.

Blue Moon of Kentucky: Bill Monroe + Elvis

There is a cutting edge to this kind of music by Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. He wrote the song, invented the style, invented the name bluegrass and for the great majority of the 20th century, embodied the art form

It was a a new form of country that melded old-time string bands with blues , challenged the instrumental abilities of the musicians, featured close harmonies and singing in a plaintive, high lonesome voice.

This version was recorded in July 6, 1954 at Sun Records with Bill Black on bass and Scotty Moore on guitar and it from the Sun Sessions. It radically reworks the arrangement:

The Sun Sessions are a compilation of Elvis Presley's classic rockabilly recordings at Sun Studios in 1954 and 1955; a mixing country and blues a pulsing beat, slap-back echo made with Scotty Moore, Bill Black and D.J. Fontana. This was seen as going into new territory of roots rock.