So, I've been thinking today about Art. One thing I'd like to get a discussion going on about is the idea of Art that is not controled by the artist beyond general influence and it's value as opposed to the traditional artist as hero model. I've been making some paintings (i'll post them soon), which are fairly classical and I've been making work that is abstract -- however I have not so much been creating anything that is truly out of my control. It seems a little lame. I mean, it seems like what may happen chaotically and randomly might be more beautiful than something I spend so much time trying to create and force into being. Obviously, I've said enough in the post to already realize it's time to do a little more work like that. But, I want to get peoples opinion. I think that the artist as pilot of this machine that is sort of out of her control is kind of interesting. And, the more unpredictable the better. But obviously some control over it would probably make it a little more unique than pure mess.
So, is anyone thinking about this? What are some good examples of art that is driven by the artist, but simultaniously out of control. I'm thinking sort of like french film in the 60's where you tell some girls on the beach to make sand castles and see what happens -- ie, the elments of the larger whole are known, but their reactions and interactions are open ended.
I'm going to see Tim Hawkinson at the Getty out here, so I'm sure that will provide some inspiration, and I know a lot of you have lots to say about this subject, so let's hear it!
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46 comments:
this is an interesting post.
i think a lot of art is built around *designing systems*, basically, although you find this a little more in music. lots of john cage, cornelius cardew's visual scores...
fluxists used chance a lot, too, yeah?
but that all seems to have been largely out of fashion for the past...30 or so years, yeah?
i mean, really, tho, any art that exists temporally has some chance elements...the actions of individuals, living creatures, are impossible to predict 100%...systems are
hahaha ten smart points for me, i can't even remember what i was trying to say with that post...
im too distracted right now...will try to contribute something a little more coherent later...
I am in Oakland now. Out here to tour schools. UCBerkeley is awesome.
I have about a million to say on this topic but I can't today - how's Wednesday for you?
Anyway, I think this topic is amazing and I certainly have been making art this way, but I don't think that it is at all the only way to go abouts things.
I want to post that notebook challenge soon, so get scanning. I lost my notebook/sketchbook/diary on the BART (it's like a subway, but not underground). Some luck person is going to get really confused.
I said I didn't have time to comment! You and your insane pizza demands!
Waaaaaaaaah...
John Cage and the Fluxus guys definitely come to mind. I think that indeterminacy is cool, but it seems to turn the focus away from the art object and toward the concept. When someone asked Cage if he thought a certain performance of one of his chance pieces was a particularly good or bad one, he said that none could be better than any other as long as the concept was adhered to. The particular realizations were utterly beyond judgement at that point. And although that's really zen and trippy and whatever, I personally lament the move away from pieces to the ideas behind the pieces.
On the other hand, it's a way to achieve a richly layered manifestation of a simple idea, which I like. maybe I'm contradicting myself.
The idea of the sand castles reminds me of performance traditions in non-literate cultures. You, as the composer, have set a task for the children, as performers, that is simple and easy to understand. But to be realized, the task demands improvisation on the part of the performer, simply because not all the parameters were set by the composer.
The oral-formulaic epic poetry of Bosnia and Ancient Greece is like this. Heavy improvisation by the performer, not in the name of self-expression per se, but because he isn't dealing with a fixed text. Traditional Irish Ballad singing is like this. There is a theoretical skeletal melody that the singer is ornamenting and changing, but that skeletal melody is never actually learned by the performer.
This might be kind of far off the mark from what you were originally talking about, but there is a really good book on oral-formulaic poetry called The Singer of Tales by Albert Lord that might be worth checking out.
I'll definitely have to check out The Singer of Tales. Yea, I agree that sometimes if it gets to conceptual it can be a little hard to swallow. It reminds me of I love you alice b toklas (the peter sellers movie where he drops being a square to become a totall hippie and has the conversations on the beach about zen and chilling out and grovin and stuff like that).
But I think the original post is about the idea of "driving" a chaotic process. And the actor metaphor really works for that because actors can improvise within a framework.
Cage and fluxus and Ono are definitely great examples. Pollocks drip paintings are sort of like this -- or do they stop too short and become too contrived? I have a hard time with ab-ex painting, I like some of it, but I'm pretty critical of a lot of it.
Yeesh, there are like a billion gramatical errors in my post above. O wel.
I agree that Pollock is an interesting example. His drip paintings give a false first impression of extreme randomness, but anybody who's ever tried to imitate his technique realizes just how controlled he really was, both in terms of the agility and specificity of his gestures and the overall harmoniousness of his compositions. Pollock's personal life may have gone out of control at times, but his paintings (I would argue) never did.
Having said that, allow me to make a slightly more complicated point. Just because Pollock was able to control his art-making process, that doesn't mean he had control over his work's ultimate meaning. To Clement Greenberg, Pollock's paintings were triumphs of formal abstraction. To Harold Rosenberg, they were powerful expressions of existentialist angst. To many collectors, the paintings were nothing so much as rare and expensive decorative objects, symbols of wealth and good taste, as is illustrated in the following Louise Lawler photograph:
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/h2/h2_2000.434.jpg
In a sense, then, an artwork can never be controlled by its original author. The artist puts the work into a public realm, but the public completes it. A work of art is not complete until other people - viewers, critics, curators, collectors - see the work and supply it with their own meanings and values. As long as people are still buying and selling the work, displaying it in museums or private collections, thinking about it, debating it, writing articles about it, teaching courses on it, banning it or defending it in court, vandalizing it, holding panel discussions about it, appropriating its imagery, storing and maintaining it, reproducing it in books and magazines and web sites, the artwork continues to transform and evolve. This part of the process - i.e. how the artwork will ultimately "turn out" - is a potentially infinite process, and it cannot be controlled by the artist. All artworks, in this sense, are open-ended process pieces that evolve over time, subject to a wide range of competing forces. An artwork is never finished; its evolution is never complete.
Yes logan, yes! We've been waiting for you to join the group, glad to have you here. The point of the public digestion and continuance of an artwork's evolving state is really a large part of this discussion. Because, what you're saying, if I hear you correctly, is that artwork that is controlled by the artist and composed and put together is still open-ended if it leaves room for interpretation. In many ways, a still life can even include this quality. It is not necessarily the freedom and looseness applied during the creation of the artwork which makes it open ended.
I think this is interesting, because it is not whether a piece is purely conceptual and algorithmic, or classical and structured, but rather it is whether or not the piece gives the audience something to hang on to.
And, if I wasn't clear, that includes all forms: Sound, music, etc.
that photograph is pretty great.
i wholeheartedly agree with logan's comments - they echo what, i believe eliot (?) wrote in regards to the 'new' and the 'canonical', and the reciprocal relationship between the two.
of course, what i think we're dealing with in this case IS historicization, which i would hesitate to directly link with performance or the purely generative act of art-making. i mean sure, everything is chaos, meaning is unstable, and the value and merit of art is hugely dependent on completley unpredictable sociocultural factors. but how wrapped up in that can you get before you start, well, completely ignoring the impact a piece of art is capable of having on an individual, and the artist's personal creative process.
so while i think it's important to be we aware of the things you brought up, in terms of one's personal art-making process, they should almost be actively ignored.
otherwise we'd all be making like "follow the exchanges made with this dollar bill for one week" type stuff, or some hippie shit like releasing doves in public spaces or something. "we can't control anything" and "we exist in such a complex, multifaceted, chaotic world" type stuff - i mean, YEAH, we do, sure. but that's certainly not an interesting point to drive home with one's art...right?
Well, I think it is an interesting point to drive home with your art, but I don't think that following dollar bills around drives it home effectively.
The thing is, you are dealing with very different things here. Chaos vs. Algorithmic/natural processes... At least in my own idiosyncratic idea of how these can be used in a process of artmaking, they both seem to take intentionality and authority out of the process, but in very different ways.
The human mind tends to react to chaotic situations and in that case art negatively. You know, missing planes, messy rooms, people who make no sense. It seems like one of our intuitive aesthetic senses (I think our sense of beauty comes from the history of our evolution and not from some sort of mathorational universal truth, except that our mental processes are decently capable of being rational if that's what we want).
The thing about Cage's chance-determined music is that it was about hearing the sounds. I think that there was this conceptual underpinning that is very interesting and all to chat about, but what he was really driving at was to make people listen to sounds. The reason it is difficult to talk about the work is that, being random and chaotic sounds, the information they contain is not compressable because it is infinitely detailed and eachunique. Compression equals understanding. You can't think about what you don't understand.
On the other hand you have forms of art determined by natural processes. Or natural processes themselves. For pure stareatablity there is absolutely nothing that beats a tree. (Naked humans are a different story - the motivation gets in the way of the seeablility and confuses our eyes - all our hair fell out people - we're cavefish). Chaos is a subset of evolution - evolution uses disorder and entropy to increase complexity and adaptability. There must be mutation for selection and reproduction and death to result in new awesome shit.
I have done a lot of work with this in mind, so don't get me wrong, I could write a fucking book.
I think one of the interesting questions that comes out of this, that was addressed obliquely before, is - if everything is driven by natural processes, what is unique about the mind that makes us see it as unnatural. I guess you have to be a pretty antispiritual dude to get close to this question, but if the mind is just an evolutionary system of competing replicators running as software on the hardware of your brain, why are the self-obsessed, coolesque, ironic drawings of art majors everywhere so overbearingly untreelike?
i forgot about the relationship your art bears to this topic, farley. i certainly didn't mean for my comments to reflect a negative opinion of your output (cuz i think its pretty great).
in your art, though, you actually exercise a LOT of control. you have designed complex systems for exploring the way human linguistic and visual modes of interpretation interact. you're closely investigating social and biological systems - it's almost more of a science experiment. which i think is pretty different from just sort of embracing the fact that our environment is imperfect and unstable, or making some glib commentary on how it's impossible for an artist to control meaning.
and not to nitpick, but is chaos a subset of evolution? or is evolution a product of the fact that the underlying force of the universe is chaos?
i don't know if i totally understand your final question, can you clarify?
Hi everybody. Blogging is awesome. Can't believe I haven't done it before!
Okay, first let me respond to Greg:
"Because, what you're saying, if I hear you correctly, is that artwork that is controlled by the artist and composed and put together is still open-ended if it leaves room for interpretation..."
Yeah, that's SORT OF what I'm saying, except I don't think the artist necessarily has to "leave room for" interpretation. Interpretation will always be there, whether we like it or not. Take the US Constitution. It was written in the most unambiguous, unpoetic, legalistic language possible, yet it's range of possible interpretations continues to expand and multiply.
Artists don't HAVE TO leave room for interpretation. But they can. Artists who say "my art means such and such thing" or "my art is a commentary on blah blah blah" are much less interesting to me than the ones who say "I don't know what any of my art means." The best art is probably that which allows for the greatest number of possible interpretations. Art that just skirts the edge of possibly meaning something. All-white paintings, for instance.
Now for Shawn's comment:
"I wholeheartedly agree with Logan's comments... but... in terms of one's personal art-making process, they should almost be actively ignored."
That's an interesting point. I'm surprised to hear this from somebody who's so involved in electronic music, which often involves the sampling of pre-existing music and the production of sounds by non-human, even random, processes. You believe art and music should be "personal" and "original"? I don't strongly disagree (although I "somewhat disagree") but mostly I'm surprised that YOU of all people would say such a thing. I thought you loved robots. What's gotten into you!
Finally, I'd like to respond to Farley, but I have to admit I don't completely follow his question...
"If the mind is just an evolutionary system of competing replicators running as software on the hardware of your brain, why are the self-obsessed, coolesque, ironic drawings of art majors everywhere so overbearingly untreelike?"
I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "untreelike." Maybe you can clarify this. Do you mean "completely cut off from (the tree of) art history"? If so, my answer is that art history may not constitute the bulk of artists' "software" any longer. Philosophy, pop culture, etc. have become more influential and important. Art history was important to the Renaissance masters (as a thing to copy and perhaps improve upon) and to the Modernists (mostly as a thing to be destroyed), but with Postmodernism history became a much more neutral thing, like a collection of stuff found at a garage sale.
"I don't care about history (rock rock rock'n'roll high school) / Cause that's not where I wanna be..."
- The Ramones
And, as for the thing about the human brain being a tree...
"The brain itself is much more a grass than a tree.... Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity."
- Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
in response to logan:
well, the sample-driven aspects of electronic music have never been really of much interest to me. the early 90's UK rave scene, which is the most sample driven of the era, is far less inspiring to me than the dystopic-yet-ecstatic output of detroit, or the grinding, lysergic, metallic skronk of belgian and germany's hardcore.
but i'm forgiving of the sample-driven aspects of UK hardcore rave, because they were born out of NECESSITY. these people didn't necessarily know how to play instruments, they probably couldn't afford fancy synthesizers - what they had were cheap samplers, and they NEEDED to make spastic, ecstatic dance music. the drugs were telling them to.
in our post-laptop, hyper-media-saturated era where, for all intensive purposes, everyone can make pretty much any sound they want to, and download every song they can imagine, i think it's important to harken back to, well, more traditional models of authenticity, purity of sound (maybe im just becoming a fascist), the pursuit of obscurity, the search for something new and liberating. otherwise we wind up with an endless parade of masturbatory mash-ups (the ultimate creative failure of pirate culture and the liberation of information) and facile glitch freakouts (when new synths and softsynths COME with "glitch" presets, you know it's over).
what i'm saying, basically, is: people need to approach art seriously, because it's the only way it can mean anything. i guess i'm a re-modernist. or something.
furthermore, i fail to see how a love of electronic, synthetic, or alien sounds - or even, YES, even a love of robots - would necessitate i embrace the (at this juncture) utterly stale and normative post-modern "garage sale" (to borrow your phrase) stance. i'm not endorsing some kind of naturalist, anti-technology art, nor am i saying art needs to be a deep genuine expression of some personal "feelings". i am opposing the glib, savvy, knowingness that has become the product of our lazy, capital-driven culture.
yes, art and culture are constantly evolving, and the past perpetually reconfiguring itself to make the present more digestible. but the auto-cannibalization that lingering on this realization engenders is poisonous to progress. our self-reflexive moment is over - let's look ahead.
also, i fucking hate the ramones.
Have you read Blanchot? Because if you haven't, you should, specifically his essay, Literature and the Right to Death. A major theme of this essay is the relationship between the writer and his work (which can just as easily be applied to any other type of art). Basically, no matter how involved you are with the creation of some work of art, it will always remain out of your control. So, within the creative-time continuum thing, between conception, creation, "finishing" of any work, these stages are always exising and not existing in relationship to eachother. Like, you read a book, or look at a painting and while doing so, in that moment all the past moments and future moments of that work play together to form what that work means. All the layers of meaning may exist, but do not necessarily retain their significance in relation to the work itself, and in effect the actual artist no longer really matters once the work has left his hands.....
so uum, I hope this makes sense....just read the essay, it's my favorite and is way smarter than what I just said...
I'm more inclined to see chaos as the driving force of the universe, and evolution as following chaos. But complexity is another force to consider, ie. complex systems and the unpredictable yet underlying order of things vs sheer and utter chaos.
I think what Total Cool Dude is saying goes along with an earlier post he made about rejecting the hyper manipulation of sound samples and the masturbatory nature of contemporary electronic music. Just because you can do whatever the fuck you want, doesn't always mean it's going to result in a great song. And I have to agree that the purity of sound is much more interesting in and of itself -- I do not see this as fascist however.
Eff gwaz, I love your work, and I was thinking about it specifically when starting this post. But I have to disagree with you on there being any difference between algorithmic / procedural things and chaotic things. Because chaos, or I guess a better word to use might be complexity (the complex relationship of many elements within an enormous system), can be an element of an algorithmic or procedural set-up.
I think the tree example is very interesting. I always liked Judy's [pfaff] work because she allowed the process and randomness determine the outcome, and getting back to the original question, how much is driven by the artist? From what I remember Judy hated abstract expressionism, for precisely what Logan pointed out about pollock -- it wasn't actually random at all, but very tightly controlled.
I want to just say at this point that I understand fully, at some point, the artist makes the call. It is after all their work, and they decide just how much of X and Y it contains.
But to simplify it all, maybe it's about building the sandbox and letting things happen inside of it. Maybe the sandcastle itself means nothing.
Oh and while I'm attempting to be deep, I shall dissagree with the quote from A Thousand Plateaus: Your brain is only like a grass if you smoke too much of it.
obviously this conversation is never going to reach a conclusion...i mean...this is some forever question type shit...man i love the EPN...but really it seems like to me that control is what the artist always wants...i mean even the least intelligent artist can predict a seried of outcomes for thier "uncontrolled" work...or else they wouldnt even bother...or...thats not entirely true...but you have to admit its kind of true...i mean...even an idiot can predict human behavior...cmon...we are pathetically preditable...we always think "as long as i gets mine's"...and as long as "mine's" works...its all good...people have no idea what they think until someone tells them its ok to think that...and that is what its all about...so an artist can try to manipulate that...but the outcome is always predictable...even with a computer...i think that thinking about evolution is a good idea....but only because evolution relies on time...which relies on nature...i dont think you can create something to be random...or uncontrolled...i think that once you think of an idea that is uncontrolled you start to think about inevitable outcomes...which support the outcome you were hoping for and tell you to implement the idea...the problem is that people arent interested...you have to drive them to be interested..and when you drive them to be interested you are driving them in a direction that you set....in order for there to be response there has to be interest and that interest didnt come from nowhere...the artist focused it so that there would be interest...whatever..that is so dumb...but i think that you cant have an uncontrolled mass..you have to cater to an interest...and as soon as you cater to an interest you a specifying your results...i dont think it is possible to have unpredictable art...maybe on a small scale..but on a mass scale..i dunno
Wow - I'm sitting in an airport trying to absorb all this. One thing I noticed is that we are all being a little vague with what these words mean: chaos, random, algorithm, entropy, evolution. I myself use an extremely personal definition of these words in my practice, ones which conform to my current systems of understanding - based on rationality to an extent but more on utility - whatever works to support the systems that make my artwork possible.
Def having trouble thinking strait about this - that's why I have to create art work. If I could explain these concepts with words I wouldn't have to draw pictures...
Airports are like order gates. There are so many systems built in to stop chaos. That's because the system is built to support an extremely unlikely event that has to happen all the time - that is that a 100ton chunk of metal, kerosene and flesh will somehow hang in the middle of the air. For example, people arriving late, they are all subject to random events - car breakdowns, lost passports, oversleeping. This should create an impossible tangled schedule leading to increasing disorder in the system, and sometimes it does, but mostly the planes tend to get to where they are going in a semi-orderly fashion. That's why sentient life is such an unusual and fascinating phenomenon. And why the galactic counsel is right now debating when to exterminate us.
In terms of "untreelike" - what I meant was that most artwork is visually uninteresting and conceptually irritating (I think the best art is usually neither of these things). What I wanted to ask was - if natural processes such as gene-driven evolution of the species and meme-driven thought processes are "natural" (controlled by the algorithm of replication - mutation - selection), then how is it that the artifacts of our thought are seen as unnatural and don't effortlessly embody the same effortless complexity and beauty that can be seen in what we call natural forms such as that of a tree?
For me all things boil down to - what is mind? What is consciousness? And why's that shit so fucked up?
That's way clearer Eff gwaz... Yea, I feel you. How can we ourselves be so random and complex, yet the product of our thoughts be so often contrived and predictable?
Henry, what you're saying is pretty interesting: that in a way we all have such clear visions of things and the way that they should turn out that we will it into being in a way. I saw on a tesla documentary that he had a difficult time differentiating between actual inventions and the ones he saw so precisely in his mind.
But also you're pointing out something else: that we're all really basic and that there really isn't much to us at all. Gossip, Junk food and pornography might be huge industries, but they really just play on primal human need for fat sugar and sex (or is it blood sugar sex and magick?).
Oh and to respond to Logan, who earlier said something about Modernism being the first rejection of Art History -- I don't think I agree.
Also, i think it might be a little wishy-washy to say that Art History is not really the software of artists today, because I for one consider it all of the time, and I don't think there is any way to prove that artists today think any more about philosophy, politics, girls, etc, in their work than at any prior point in history.
And, I'll probably take some heat for this, but isn't all good post-modernism really just modernism anyway? Does Andy Ryder want to join this discussion?
I went to a recent UCLA grad show, and I have to say that 99% of the work was really, really shitty. There is nothing worse than a majority of students thinking they have a grasp on what 'bad painting' is and then deciding to make that their life's work. How VERY untreelike
This article about robot consciousness is very introductory but addresses most of the issues brought up here so far, and specifically EFFGWAZDORS question about consciousness. The article uses Jaynes conception of consciousness as a model for potential robot brain/minds. Jaynes was the author of bicameralism and darling of the early cyberpunk sci fi movement.
http://www.sas.org/E-Bulletin/2003-12-19/robots/index.html
I don't remember who said it above, but the difference between "controlled" and uncontrolled" work, or that between chaos and conformity is in fact zero and is better conceived of simply as complexity. I'd say that only in consciousness do patterns begin to have meanings and feelings attached to them. And if consciousness is "structured metaphor" as the roboticist article suggests then the conception we have of how life on earth works together is perhaps as much 'art' as 'science.'
The article its self seems almost artifact, though when seen in light of the previous posts. ahh I'm being forced to log off this public computer...more tomorrow
i'm intrigued by henry's assertion that basically 'no art can be unpredictable'.
andy ryder (who i can invite to join the blog, if people want) once told me about a man he met at (i believe) a john zorn show, who was complaining about the 'superperiodicity' of most avant-improv. which basically meant that no matter how chaotic, how unpredictable, how noisy, how random - the music still had patterns and structures that repeated themselves over broader stretches of time. huge amounts of discipline, skill, and focus are required to make an actual COMPLETE mess.
so on one hand we have the assertion that everything is chaos, and it is impossible for an artist to control meaning - but on the other hand, there is the notion that it is actually impossible for humans to produce pure chaos.
@ greg - i think logan is correct in stating that the modernists were the first large-scale break from art history. the whole point of modernism was to destroy tradition, erase the conventions of the past several hundred years.
and i don't think logan was suggesting that artists today aren't aware of or interested in art history, but that for lots of artists, *Art History proper* is just as important as, i dunno, video game history or john waters movies or whatever, i dunno. people don't exactly "study the masters" anymore, you know? history isn't something to studiously ape or rashly break from - it's just sort of there. (sorry if i'm putting words in your mouth, logan)
can you expand on your point about "good post-modernism really just being modernism"? i think i probably disagree, but would like to hear more of what you have to say...
@ eff -
the last paragraph of your post is very interesting, i need to think about it. you seem to be touching on some sort of mind/body duality issues, maybe?
Total Cool Dude: So, in response to the question of how good post-modernism is really just modernism, what I was basically saying was in aggreement with the idea that Modernism was about erasing previous conventions -- I just happen to think that Art has always tried to do that, although it might not jump out at us as obvious.
I know we can only look at the history which has been written down, but I have a hard time trusting any of that to begin with. So, it's my personal opinion that the way artists think hasn't really changed much, and although we're told that so and so was acting in the footsteps of [insert important historical master], we have no way to know what was really occuring in that Artist's mind, and whether or not they were really acting on the inspiration of some street performance they had just seen, or how skillfully the chef cooked their fish at the previous night's banquet.
So, really, I wasn't so much disagreeing with what Logan was identifying as today's artist's inspiration, but rather questioning whether or not it has ever been any different. I will give in though on the point that today there is just a lot more freedom to move around, but I think that has less to do with the artist (who has probably always craved this freedom) and more to do with the societal shift in acceptance of such looseness.
Another thing to consider is that history does not get written in the present (unless you work for the current US Administration), and as much as a movement might seek to "break" from historical progression, it is, ultimately, out of their hands. History will decide, as 'they' say..
Finally, on the point of "isn't good post-modernism really just modernism?" -- this is not a proof, but rather a personal opinion that post-modernism's aim to reject metanarratives and embrace non-linearity would be fairly impossible without the tools that modernism has supplied. The internet, and this blog is a good example. Or collage. Or Minimalism.
I guess what I'm really trying to say is, there is no way to prove that because an artist from [blank] years ago created a painting that demonstrated subjectivity and objectivity, probably through the metaphors of angels and 'god', that the artist really actuallysaw the world like that, and it wasn't really just the politcal establishment of the time enforcing their brand of propaganda, ie, it was just a job.
So, while we might have the awareness to realize that we are within a time of rebellion and rejection of previous standards, couldn't it be argued that every age has such periods, and that in the end, whatever major political force comes out the winner -- it is they who decide how history reads? And it is those people who will define what Art was during the 20th and 21st centuries?
The side note on post-moderism (which is such a bitch because it could probably go on forever), sort of sidetracked me from moderating back to the original discussion.
My uncle hates trees. He used to tear them all up out of the ground. I think he was crazy. But, anyway, I was about to build on Eff's original assertion that a tree could be looked at forever, and then I remembered my uncle and...
Anyway, can everybody talk a little more about that idea? Eff, maybe you can expand on that last paragraph a little bit more? I think the relationship of intrisic natural beauty, our own consciousness and the artist's ability to express those things is really interesting.
Maybe the way we always fail to do so is also interesting?
Silly questions, silly questions, just trying to keep the post rolling.
@ greg -
your points regarding history/historicization are very well-taken. there is certainly a lot we don't know and can't know about the past. and historicization is an ongoing process, of course, as discussed earlier in this thread.
however, i'm skeptical about the notion that the goal of all good artists has always been to break convention or whatever. i mean, sure, lots of times we have no way of knowing what an artist was thinking, but we can make some pretty informed guesses. your argument is based on the assumption that "because what we know is a product of the sometimes-faulty, imperfect process that is historicization, i'm just going to assume i'm right"? it seems a little bit of a stretch to me...and taken to extremes, i don't think i like where that kind of logic leads...
i think artists have always struggled with the creative process, but the sociocultural climate today is VASTLY different than it was 500 years ago. or 100 years ago. or 50 years ago. different environments produce different goals, different artistic aims. artists have probably always wanted freedom (almost everyone in every era is stifled by financial necessity) - but you know, in the 1700's maybe that meant "i just wish i could paint landscapes instead of doing portraits", you know? i mean, obviously renaissance painters weren't thinking 'i wish i could make video art'. cultural products and artistic goals are defined by their era.
and not to get too embroiled in this likely-to-become-tedious debate, but of course post-modernism couldn't exist without modernism - it's a reaction to it! the difference is marked by a shift in goals, not so much as tools or methods.
@ tucker -
thanks for posting that article. very cool!
i'm intrigued by the injection of the term 'complexity' (greg was the first to use it) into our lexicon here. i think i might like the notion that what we are dealing with here is not the opposition between 'chaos' and 'order' or 'control', but simply existence in a complex system...
do people care to expound upon this idea any? this seems to be a productive avenue of exploration.
and farley - i agree with greg. please elaborate more on this whole beauty/consciousness/expression thing!
Hahah, good point regarding my attempt to devalue all historical record.. (*bad g-reg, *bad g-reg)
I'll agree with you overall on this one, and in fact I think I'm pretty much on the same page as you and Logan after all, but was getting hung up on semantics.
I do really like the image of a portrait painter sitting there thinking, "oh if only....". Hillarious.
I think the example of complexity theory I read about was boiling water. What seems like a chaotic process in fact shows signs of deeply routed order -- almost like the molecules 'know' how to arrange themselves into that honeycomb structure.
I just picked up "Animal Architects" by Carol and James Gould, hopefully they'll touch on some of this.
I think I need to take a nap after reading all this crap. I am feeling a little overwhelmed by how abstract and expansive this conversation is and I want to draw it back towards my personal experience or biographical aspects... So forgive me if I get all wack.
I am talking a lot about trees because the UCBerkeley campus had amazing trees. The most amazing were these trees (you've prob seen something similar) where they cut off all the little shoots every year, so there are these twistey branches thtat end in these gnarley knotty burl stumps. They kind of look like Joshua trees, but I think they are deciduous. I was thinking how the trees were a prefect example of mind-driven intentionality and natural growth processes. That is why these trees were amazing to look at, but also meaningful. More meaningful to me than other trees because there was intention and intentional pattern. Like I said before - a sensory experience of an object made without the intervention of the human mind - I'm talking some serious back-to-nature shit here, is fully detailed and can't be compressed without losing detail. It can be a deeply sensory experience, but everything said about it with be superfluous and fall short. This is how Cage would have us experience listening to music. But when we listen to repetitive pop music we can understand it, it messes with our motivations and instincts and mind - it gets stuck in our head. There is a lot to say about music because it is compressable and like I said before, understanding = compression. Cage's relationship to Zen was a profound one. He was not simple reacting to or reporting on Japanese Zen aesthetics, but creating an aesthetic based on his deep understanding of Zen and mind. You can talk about his creative intentional act of creating the concept and scores of his work, but the sound doesn't appeal to our voracious minds, only to our senses. Which is of course why most folks would rather do almost anything than listen to Cage's music. But treehuggers should probably get more into it.
You are asking me to be clearer on consciousness and I would be, but the thing is - the reason that I am so unclear is that I think this is where the frontier of science art and spirituality are right now. I can't really give you an answer because nobody knows the answer. But we know a lot more about what kinds of questions to ask and we are starting to answer a few of them. I am kind of working on a reading list and explanation on synesthetic superscam, but I haven't posted it yet.
Anyway, of course my project RELAY (I am going to assume familiarity now because I've posted the link) deals with this. Part of the algorithm (which is a kind of fancy work for process) of creation was the communication of two minds. The process was goal-based, not creative or maybe I should say expressionistic. But yet new forms were created, forms that look expressionistic. But they weren't intended as such. Because the participants were discouraged from expressing their feelings or personalizing the art, the drawings don't have the burdensome overbearing aspect that ruins a lot of art. They are more like some kind of complex printout. They are more datalike. They are less mindrotted. Then I think that we can see a little more clearly that we humans are automatic. Or at least this is how I am thinking of this project this week. Other projects I have done have also dealt with intention - the part of your mind that you have the most difficulty accepting as being automatic. The part that creates annoyingness like burdensome drawings and rocking around the xmas tree. That is why the explanations in "Parsing the Panoptic Fugue" were completely absurd - they were as full an expression of intention as possible, but still not full because intention can never be satisfied. Because minds and language are infinite systems. The explanations may have been annoying, but they were also seductive and engrossing (I am feeling positive today, so forgive my self-congratulation - I mean it only as explicative). This is because it appealed to our ego - our thinking mind, our "I". It was certainly untreelike. I have been trying to drive trees out of my drawing. Although when I smoke grass, treelike drawings amd thought for that matter become more appealing, but later I realize that it is a game you can never win. Better to stick to egocentric thought and kill it from the inside than to just take a short excursion into infinite complexity. Ugly stupid drawings, maybe one day I will realize in y heart how ugly they are. That's why I like the Ramones, because they follow stupidity. But they failed to go far enough. Our minds are backwards where stupid blunt uncomplicated things appeal, like, I don't know, dick in a box. That's why we shouldn't destroy all the plants and other natuarl systems in the world - not too get too Japanese on y'all, but it would be very hard to get out of your mind if you lived in an environment entirely created by mind. Then everyone would really go out of their minds, which actually means completely immersed in mind - i.e. crazy. Trees are sanity devices.
Complexity. TCD, I don't know whether it was g-reg or I who used this word first - we certainly seem to have some vocab in common. I used it because it is a better word than "advanced" when talking about evolution because advanced is a value judgement. But complexity is a bit more objective - although everything is infititely complex billiardballesque molecule-wise, just a blank page has just as much info as one covered with words, that is, before compression(understanding). But systems, like life, can be mathmatically modelled as complex or simple fairly onjectively. Avoiding the great chain of being is a challenge always and pays off, but it would be stupid not to recognize that the humanmind is a level more complex than a monkeymind in terms of systems and function. Therefore complexity is one of the keys to razoring trees from rocking around the xmas tree.
What?
I also am interested in "automatic drawing" - it is not a process-based method of creating art, but it is a discipline, a practice, a mindfullness excercise that is a different means to the same end - the expulsion of recursive mind-simulation-generated thought from the product. For it is possible to make good art. I mean, I know that when I draw I breathe differently. And when I make a really good drawing I am not usually trying to express myself, or to do anything, sometimes it seems like I'm not around. And I think others can see this as well. Impostor drawings are pretty easy to spot. That's why "act naturally" is the most profound Ringo Starr song.
You can tell I'm a member of my generation with that last bit.
Ringo Starr is a good artist. Also, GEORGINA Starr.
I'm about to run off to an art opening, but wanted to say:
"Oh and while I'm attempting to be deep, I shall dissagree with the quote from A Thousand Plateaus: Your brain is only like a grass if you smoke too much of it."
Nice one.
Also, I want to agree with the direction Farley is going here in his discussion of Zen. This fits into what I was saying earlier about how viewers, curators & the historicizing process are co-creators of all artworks. The artist is only a mirror. Whatever tree or moss or psychedelic lichen the artist's mind resembles is a product of DNA plus whatever memetic pinballs have been blipping and bopping around in it. The pinball game continues as the artwork (an imperfect holographic funhouse mirror of the artist's mind) is played upon by millions more mirrored balls. The artist determines the game (although it's really just perhaps a larger "game" playing "through" the artist), but the participants determine the gameplay and the score.
Like, dude.
Oh & somebody should tell me how to start my own post on this thing.
And Shawn should invite Andy. He likes it when I talk "trippy."
and sorry for those of you who wrote things specifically for me to respond to - especially the blanchot thing (the only thing i've read is "writing of the disaster" - which i liked) - but i'm really late, so... no time!
It does seem like after reading all thisstuff that the whole conversation has been mired mostly in the abstract. So I have another treelike example. Today I interviewed for a job in the shipping department of a midwestern manufacturing plant. It functions like a very complex orgamism, and meets many of the biological qualifications for being alive: it evolves in a competitive/cooperative internall and external environment, grows (to some extent), and needs water. Though it doesn't necessarily move, neither do trees. It went from shipping 100,000 dollars of product per day to seven years later shipping a million dollars. The guy said mostly because it consolidated sister agencies and reorganized the floor plan of the manufacturing floor. It was startling to realize that one of the "cells" could describe the cause and effect of indefinite variations in the "animal". This sort of relationship is unlike that between say, our white cells, because we have consciousness, and can draw analogies between the human anatomy and that of a manufacturing plant. Perhaps it is the role of the artist to present these analogies in a way that makes them more understandable. Or as EFG would maybe say, compress the analogies into some more read/writable format. Though I am not sold on the whole to understand we must compress business. Can someone help me understand that?
Understanding equals compression is taken from the work of mathmatical philosopher Gregory Chaitin. For more info, please go see the lecture:
Gregory Chaitin Lecture Mälardalen University 2005 Pt 4.
Actually, let me pull out some quotes for you.
"Understanding = Compression."
"An explanation only explains if it is simpler, if it is more compact, than that which it seeks to explain."
"If the best theory is as complicated as what you are trying to describe, that means it's incomprehensible, it cannot be explained, there is no theory."
"You can always prove things by adding them as new axioms."
"If you have a string of 0s and 1s where the smallest possible program to calculate it is the same size... these are totally unstructured bits - it's a string which has no explantion, no theory, cannot be comprehended. It can only be comprehended as a thing in itself."
"Of course all science and math that we care about are cases where there are theorems, because humans are more interested in situations they understand than one's they can't understand."
A bit repetitive there, but I want to make this point: a tree, as an infinitely complicated form that can only be comprehended by an infinitely complicated set of numbers, is uncompressable and un-understandable. This is why we are caught staring at a tree. Because, in the terminology of Zen aesthetics, it has "suchness." Or as Chaitin says "It can only be comprehended as a thing in itself." The same with Cage's music - which, although it has a score, or a series of instructions (as indeed a tree has it's genes encoded in DNA), it incorporates chance (as does a tree) and is therefore un-understandable. This is why we can't explain it - but only listen. Or rather that our explanation will be as simple as a child's drawing of a tree - it will fall far short. But a child's drawing of a tree is comprehensible, explainable, and therefore messes with our monkeymind motivations. As repetitive pop music does. And as do Henry's flash trees because they do not incorporate chance.
FLASH TREES / POP MUSIC / REAL TREES
Thanks for posting those quotes F-Gwaz. The Pop music example is interesting, because I guess sampled drums are a compressed explanation of real drums, etc. The lyrical themes too -- they're so often hyper compressed versions of long tales (The Zombies, "Roses For Emily" --> "A Rose for Emily", William Faulkner short story).
I think henry's tree's are a bad though. I'm pretty sure random number generators in computers are good at picking "actual" random numbers (don't they use real-world feedback to generate the number?), which is how those flash trees are constructed. They use an L-system algorithim, which while in itself is a compressed 'theory' of what a tree is, when combined with randomized numbers it can take on a total uniqueness, and you'll never get the same tree twice (unless you uses the same "seed" when generating your random number).
I think the key to those flash trees, in making them real trees (and I mean for the sake of argument -- not suggesting we replace "real" trees with "digital" trees) would be to apply randomness to every aspect of there construction. The length of the branch, the width, the color variation across the surface. It's never going to be a "real" tree, but you would probably achieve the same "huh?" effect.
But maybe you'd need a supercomputer that doesn't exist yet. Because what's interesting is that even though humans can't do the same massive numbers of the type of calcuations that a computer can -- we are SO good at detecting patterns, even in massive data sets. But we often take that for granted. Consider all of the minute differences of human voices, yet we can pick out our friend from a group.
I think it was Motherwell (the painter) who said something like, "Art is that which is inimitable". So, maybe in that respect great Art is that which is a tree.
Total Cool Dude: I just went back and re-read this:
"..and the past perpetually reconfiguring itself to make the present more digestible. but the auto-cannibalization that lingering on this realization engenders is poisonous to progress. our self-reflexive moment is over - let's look ahead."
And I just wanted to say, that that paragraph is amazing, because I don't think I said that earlier. Word.
Oh and Henry: Ef is talking some shit about your trees, you should really join back into this conversation. ;)
Ok, I'm littering this shit with posts I know, but I had to clarify. Above it says "Henry's trees are a bad". That's not me speaking with an italian accent and saying they're bad as in "The pasta, she's a no good. Wouldyoulikadapizza?"
Rather,
That's supposed to read "Henry's trees are a bad example".
I don't give a fuck what Henry thinks I think about his trees. Thats waaay to recursive for me. Fool can program whatever shape artificial life he WANTS TO.
Shit.
So I've been working on this masturbatory mash-up and I figured this might be a good place to put up a link, as per the discussion on sample-based electronic music.
To be clear, though, I'm not sampling phrases - I've always been really into sampling short snippets and arranging and manipulating them based on their function in the work, and not as a cute thing to be recognized. Therefore I don't see this kind of sampling as reflexive - rather, by picking the sounds and changing them to my liking, I am shortcutting to my goal of making any sound I wish. I hope to achieve "suchness".
To be honest, sometimes a sample is chosen and a musical use is given to it. My Rosanne Arnold and Howard Dean sound collages worked in this way. Unfortunately it's been hard to get people to listen to the melody and rhythm of the speakers without taking meaning as well. At any rate, the intent was the same.
I'd be interested to hear any ideas on the coolness or lameness of appropriation. It's something I'm getting into lately (get ready for these fucking Garfield cut-up videos I'm working on. Oh man.) But I'm also wondering how I should feel about the structure and these harmonic choices I've made. I was never friends with harmony - texture and rhythm are my bros for life.
Also, gigantic props will go out to anyone who can identify some of these samples (two are easy, most are not).
Silver Birth Blade
I really like that piece Drew.
It reminds me of this idea I had back in 2001 which was to put together a group show where the theme was recollections of PBS.. Colors, synth sounds, things, etc that people remember from the shows they watched on PBS when they were kids.
The song feels pretty structured to me -- almost in a mark mothersbaugh rugrats sort of way. The harmony is solid, but I would almost say you could go even heavier in the texture and rythm direction with this one, the melody is pretty dominant.
i'm going to respond to this comment, seeing that its specifically baiting me :P
before i start, i think drew's piece could probably use it's own thread, tho - this one is pretty crowded, and there are some interesting things to discuss here.
i like the piece pretty good, despite my conceptual/theoretical qualms with it - the composition and structure is great, and i adore the ramshackle pantonality. i think greg's PBS comments are spot-on - the cheerful, lo-fi exuberance is there.
of course, i think all of this could be better and more interestingly accomplished without the use of explicit samples.
what this song is to me is a cool/cute little piece with a glaring depeche mode sample (didnt' recognize the others, but they are still quite noticable as *outside sources*). why is that sample there? you say you aim to utilize samples in a purely functional, non-reflexive manner. if you are uninterested in exploiting cultural resonances of heavily-loaded sound bytes, why include them? laziness? i mean, you are obviously an intelligent, capable musician (certainly more so than myself) - why not just make the sounds yourself?
on the surface, including samples, particularly immediately recognizable ones, adds layers of meaning to a piece. it supplies instant context, automatic commentary on the multifaceted, hyper-referential sphere we exist in. but i find this gesture, particularly at this point, ultimately reductive. ambiguity is LOST with the inclusion of cultural references. so is substance.
*queue stock shawn rant*
sure, no art is totally insular - but this compulsion, a nervous tic afflicting our generation, to keep pointing that out over and over begs some serious questioning.
"get it?"
"get it?"
"get it?"
if we keep telling ourselves that everything has been done, and nothing is new, then....uh....nobody is going to do anything new.
furthermore, this gesture, perhaps at one point a bold assertion that needed to be made, not only loses potency with each iteration, but more and more becomes the dominant, normative ideology.
take, for instance, the tv show 'family guy'. i can't watch it. now i'm not a stalwart supporter of traditional narrative, but the show is literally *about nothing*. it is nothing more than a forum for banal pop cultural references. "dude...remember gary coleman???" *ZING*. in the shows' rebellion from a more traditional narrative (oh the great behemoth that must be toppled), its dogged pursuit of pastiche and ADHD nonlinearity/ hyperreferentiality, it winds up promoting much greater evils - political passivity, languid bemusement, a stultified hypnotic abeyance.
in the early 2000's, appropriation-based electronic pop music came to the forefront. every college kid had a laptop, a cracked copy of fruity loops, a dozen gigs of mp3's, and a head half full of theory. yo, i was there. but, like, it's almost 2010...
so yeah, basically i'm asking - why not just make the sounds yourself? i think you'd find it's more fun, challenging, and provides much stranger, more interesting results.
**that isn't to say i think all appropriation-based art is bad or lazy. the situationist film, 'can dialectics break bricks?', in which marxist rhetoric is overdubbed onto a kung-fu flick, for instance, is a blast (the piece is over 40 years old, however). public enemy is one of my favorite bands ever, and i've expressed my begrudging affinity for early rave culture. but these are moments past.
(oh, and at the same time, i'm loathe to endorse a return to earnesty, naturalism, as per, for instance, animal collective and gang. faux-mysticism and wholesale nostalgia aren't my jam)
reread my post - wanted to state 2 things...
when i said "i think drew's piece could probably use it's own thread, tho - this one is pretty crowded, and there are some interesting things to discuss here."
by "here" i meant, "about drew's piece" - i wasn't saying "there are interesting things that need to be discussed in this thread, and drew's piece is not one of them".
and "queue shawn rant" should probably read "cue", right?
smart stuff. my roomate drank all my beer :(
Good call, Drew, you should re-post the song as a new thread, because it's definitely worth a more detailed discussion that would probably clog up this particular one.
*However* it does go really nicely back into that same constantly evolving and brewing (mmmm beer... wait I'll get to that in a second) zeitgeist we have here:
Ok, so "Mmmmmm, Beer". So, we only have to look to the simpsons for the very way out of this whole mess they were partly responsible for brining us into.
Moe Sizlak, when asked by Barney, after the conversion of Moe's Tavern into a trendy Postmodern locale -- When asked what Postmodern is, Moe responded to the effect of:
"POMO? You know, weird for weird's sake."
Total cool dude, you couldn't be more right about Family Guy. Now for those of you who haven't stormed off in anger because I have questioned the all mighty sanctity of Peter Griffen, let me first say that I LOVE Family guy. But, I also can't stop drinking Coca Cola. Now, I know coke (the soda, let's be real people) is bad for me, but I can't stop drinking it. Actually is it bad for me? Someone needs to help me out on that one.
Anyway, what's my rant? Ok, I think that Family Guy is empty calories, man, and I think Total Cool Dude is right. The problem runs deeper than that too, but I'm sort of a slave to it, so I can't really see it to well. And, uh, that's sort of the problem.
I do think that samples, if they really mean something to oneself, should be incorporated into music, because if anything means enough to oneself, than it is worth doing. But the question here is, why not make more samples of one's own, and I think that is totally the way to go.
I mean, A LOT of this conversation has been about setting up processes for oneself to follow up until completion, and collecting instruments and playing them to make samples to put into a library seems like 90% of the fun and 90% of the work as well.
Ok, let's use TAGs more efficiently. I promise I'll stop using them to write little stoned out stories, and I think whenever we come up with a piece that relates to this or any other thread, we put the thread's title in the TAG. ie:
TAGS: Sex, Butts, Bart Simpson, algorithmic / chaotic / natural processes
We will get a sweet little feedback loop within the community and shit will light up like kansas city lights seen from planes above.
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