Anti-Chang

In response to the post in which I suggested that (the Sarah Chang video of) "The Four Seasons" is Kitsch, let me post a response to that piece of music by the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, a tribute I believe he wrote in order to bring out the true essence and finest qualities of Vivaldi's timeless masterpiece. Please, have a listen.




Now, I don't want us to get too far out of the Middle Ages. But what do you suppose Schnittke is trying to say about Vivaldi. Is this truly a tribute? If so, why? And if not, why not? Does Schittke believe Vivaldi is Kitsch? If so, why? And if not, why not? Is Schnittke's own piece Kitsch? If so, why? And if not, why not? Is there perhaps some other term we could use to denominate either of these pieces?




If nothing else, upon this much at least I hope we can all agree, that the lower-budget video is far less wretched than the high-tech studio production in which the almost annoyingly pretty Sarah Chang blabs her head off. With her reputation for wearing only gorgeous designer gowns, and the fact that regularly blogging and making celebrity appearances has been a major component of her total process of public relations, Chang really has attempted to style herself not so much as a violin virtuoso so much as a violin diva. Call it "promotion and development" or "advocacy" all you want. It's abundantly apparent to me that the Chang/Orpheus Chamber Orchestra "Four Seasons" project was conceived to do one thing and one thing only: sell an immediately recognizable and easily consumed commodity, and thus make lots of money. I mean, honestly, when you listen to "Winter", what do you really picture blowing in the wind, leaves or $100 bills?

"Something for everyone!" - Sarah Chang / "Dreadful!" - BK

Even what is called ornamentation (parerga), i.e., what is only an
adjunct and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete
representation of the object, in augmenting the delight of taste
does so only by means of its form. Thus it is with the frames of
pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of palaces.
But if the ornamentation does not itself enter into the composition of
the beautiful form-if it is introduced like a gold frame merely to win
approval for the picture by means of its charm-it is then called
finery and takes away from the genuine beauty.

- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (1789)


Below is a little promo for Sarah Chang's performance of Antonio Vivaldi's beloved "The Four Seasons". Have a look and a listen.

I won't even bother to ask whether this is genuine Art or dreadful Kitsch. Of course it's junk.

What I will ask you to consider though is exactly why, from a Kantian perspective, it is so bad. Is this Kitsch through and through, or is there actually something genuinely decent here which just happens to be mixed with horrendous accretions of incidental ornament? In the video below Chang keep refer to "the poems": "The sonnets are integrated into the music and one can't go without the other, giving a vision of a certain animals or emotion to go along with the music." What are these poems to which she refers, James Thomson's "Seasons," a set of four baroque poems, no doubt based on four different aspects of nature capture in for painterly images. They are, by all currently standards and accounts, utterly dreadful.

Anyhow, watch the following and see what I consider BAD to look like. I welcome and encourage all comments.







The sonnets or poems to which Chang refers are the same poems to which famed art critic Clement Greenberg refers in his landmark essay, "Toward a Newer Laocoon".

Lessing in his Laokoon written in the 1760s, recognized the presence of a practical as well as a theoretical confusion of the arts. But he saw its ill effects exclusively in terms of literature, and his opinions on plastic art only exemplify the typical misconceptions of his age. He attacks the descriptive verses of poets like James Thomson as an invasion of the domain of landscape painting, but all he could find to say about painting's invasion of poetry was to object to allegorical pictures which required an explanation, and to paintings like Titian's "Prodigal Son," which incorporate "two necessarily separate points of time in and and the same picture".

The Seasons
by James Thomson
(1700 - 1748)
"Winter"

SEE! Winter comes, to rule the varied Year,
Sullen, and sad; with all his rising Train,
Vapours, and Clouds, and Storms: Be these my Theme,
These, that exalt the Soul to solemn Thought,
And heavenly musing. Welcome kindred Glooms!
Wish'd, wint'ry, Horrors, hail! -- With frequent Foot,
Pleas'd, have I, in my cheerful Morn of Life,
When, nurs'd by careless Solitude, I liv'd,
And sung of Nature with unceasing Joy,
Pleas'd, have I wander'd thro' your rough Domains;
Trod the pure, virgin, Snows, my self as pure:
Heard the Winds roar, and the big Torrent burst:
Or seen the deep, fermenting, Tempest brew'd,
In the red, evening, Sky. -- Thus pass'd the Time,
Till, thro' the opening Chambers of the South,
Look'd out the joyous Spring, look'd out, and smil'd.
THEE too, Inspirer of the toiling Swain!
Fair AUTUMN, yellow rob'd! I'll sing of thee,
Of thy last, temper'd, Days, and sunny Calms;
When all the golden Hours are on the Wing,
Attending thy Retreat, and round thy Wain,
Slow-rolling, onward to the Southern Sky.

BEHOLD! the well-pois'd Hornet, hovering, hangs,
With quivering Pinions, in the genial Blaze;
Flys off, in airy Circles: then returns,
And hums, and dances to the beating Ray.

. . . (read more)

With respect to the painting of the same cultural moment, monumental modernist art critic Clement Greenberg passed a similarly harsh verdict: "The worst manifestations of literary and sentimental painting had already begun to appear in the painting of the late 18th century - especially in England, where a revival which produced some of the best English painting was equally efficacious in speeding up the process of degeneration." To whom or what could Greenberg be referring here? I will wager most anything that by the best English painting he was referring to this (please, click the image).



William Hogarth
(1697 - 1764)
The Marriage Contract,
from the "Marriage a la Mode" series (1745)
Tate Gallery, London

To what abysses of vulgarity did Greenberg believed such painting inevitably lead? How about the Pre-Raphaelites? At least as far as Greenberg is concerned, this is about as bad as it gets.



Holman Hunt
"The Hireling Shepherd" (1852)
Oil on canvas -30" x 48"
Manchester City Art Galleries

Pere-Versions of Love and Hate

They key to understanding the issues we are currently discussing, or at least to understanding these matters as Krauss does, is to read what I've written on Saussure, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and Althusser as carefully as possible, in order to gain an insight into just how completely our consciousness, for these philosophers and critics, is imbricated within the structure of ideology.



"Without Visible Rival"
There is, for these thinkers, absolutely no way to think outside of ideology, and so we have no way to understand what artifacts - even from the relatively recent past - might have meant within the context of their own culture which is not deeply perverted by the fact that our reconstruction of the past is being conceived and written from within history. Invariable we project the values of our own culture onto the past. And one of the most common ways of doing this, at least or especially within the academy, is to "historicize" the past in development terms. Is there then no alternative to getting the past wrong? Well, there may be, but it will not be easy. How is this to be done? That too is a very complicated issue. But the shorthand answer is this, to replace the history of the past with the genealogy or "archeology" (not understood casually but rather in a very specific technical sense) of the past, the groundwork for which will be the genealogy or archeology of the present.

Althusser, in various of his writings, attempts to theorize the possibility of such a project. The result of his thought, which is long and complicated and greviously difficult, is to argue for the possibility of a wholly material and wholly immanent critique, one which attempts not so much to dismantle as to "transcode" the entire system from within. Such a project, to put things as succinctly as possible, will take the form of a radical inversion of the dominant order, one which will entail as radical reversing of those terms and values which have enjoyed cultural privilege. An alternative history must emerge, one written in the terms provided by the devalued axis. The history of Humanity must be re-written from the perspective of the Monstrous.


This is precisely what Krauss, along with a small group of very close colleagues, has attempted to do in the two-volume survey shown below. Her reward for her efforts has been to win herself the hatred of at least half the art historical world. You may well find yourself, after long consideration, to be numbered among the haters. At a very fundamental level, we don't, from a structuralist perspective, really get to choose. At a certain moment, we find, if we are one of the rare few who to a life in Art or Text at all, that we have either "always already" loved Rosalind Krauss or "always already" wanted to see her hung, drawn and quartered.

Roger Kimball,
"Feeling Sorry for Rosalind Krauss"
New Criterion 1993
(I'll post this when I can get access to it.)






Ideological Claptrap

As a professional art historian who teaches twentieth century art at public university, I find this book to be virtually worthless. Not only do the authors leave out artists from their book because they don't adhere to their own rigid ideological orthodoxies, but the book is very badly written; they undermine their own arguments by constantly lapsing into semi-meaningless jargon. A good postmodernist/ Marxist perspective in a general introduction to twentieth century would be useful, but these authors are too inept and arrogant to bring it off.

One of the worst books I've ever read.

As a visual studies major, I've read my fair share of theory and art history books, and this is by far the worst. It is filled with statements that ramble on for full paragraphs leave you looking for both the period and the point. The reader gets the impression that an intoxicated art historian is rambling on at a party, completely unaware of how uninteresting he or she is, or how little sense is being made. The legitimate information in this book could be presented in a pamphlet. I was forced to read this, and sift through 704 pages of hay to find the needle. I literally read this book while walking on a treadmill in order to maintain consciousness.

Like chewing through tough propaganda

"....an indispensible resource for understanding how our current cultural moment is inflected by changing conceptions of the past" as another reviewer puts it. It sure is that. It certainly demonstrates quiet clearly how some academics choose to reappropriate historical fact in order to fall in line with the narrow, convaluted views and theoretical constructs of a few, who wish to establish themselves as the, self appointed, "new and improved" cannon. Far too many omissions for my liking. It's a huge and relevant Art world out there !! Be warned . . . If you are not prepared for the language (at least Batchelor of Arts Degree level)you may feel like an illiterate Medieval peasant traveling out of your village for the first time in order to enter the doors of Cologne cathedral to hear a man in a pointy hat speaking Latin !!

One star is one star too many

This book appears to have no relevance. The word 'critical' is used frequently but never truly defined in context to art. If the work is taken as valued, it is an illuminating theory with merit. When not valuable it is deemed as privileging, or illegitimately an assertion of the preferences of the artist and a social privilege, i.e. men, capitalists, etc.

Nietzsche: "God is dead." ~ Althusser: "Man Is Dead."

All of what you say about Althusser is essentially correct, though it does seem to me that you're concentrating on the opening section of his essay. That part, as I said in a previous post, is interesting and important, but in many ways, as Althusser himself avers, is not terrifically different from Gramsci's writings on hegemony. The opening, in retrospect, will appear quite different, far more thematically nuanced and critically insightful, after you've read through the end of the essay, which is simply staggering.

It's in the later half that Althusser puts forth his whole theory of interpelation, wherein he presents not just an argument about the oppressiveness for workers of the relations of production, but, far more fundamental, an account of the process whereby the working $ubject is produced. Yes, churches, schools and offices are sites where this takes place. But the key for Althusser, something I tried to point out in class with my presentation of the semiotic square, is that one is not a subject who after the fact enters into "the relationships of the relations of production".


Just to bring you up to speed, not only should the duplication of the stem "relat-" catch your eye, but in particular Althusser's use of the word "relation-ships". This is not a Marxist economic terms of the sort Gramsci would have used but rather an anthropological term, one taken directly from Claude Levi-Strauss. It refers to the superstar anthropologist's presentation, in Structural Anthropology, of the "elementary structure of kinship", an atomic set of basic familial relationship which inform all identities, activities and even attitudes within primitive cultures. The point Levi-Strauss wants to make in this essay is that within such structures the individual means nothing. Each individual body enters into the structure, which is to say into culture, only insofar as loses its individuality and takes up a functional role within the larger whole. Not only does the discrete biological body no longer exist in the raw form after this moment of "interpelation" (as if it ever did in the first place), but indeed the individual unit of consciousness does not exists before this moment of entry into larger structure. Even before its birth, as Althusser insists, the individual was "always already" a $ubject.


This is the crucial difference between Marx and Althusser; or, between the early Marx and Althusser. Because one of Althusser's greatest projects, a life-long project, was to demonstrate something I discussed in class yesterday - that at a certain moment in Marx's life, around 1848, a fundamental epistemological shift ("decalage") occurs. In the same way that pre-history of modern sculpture, at a point around 1900, can be seen to meet an agonized end in the failed commisions of August Rodin; or just as the historical "moment" that was modernist sculpture in turn meets its demise around 1964, when a welter of previously unimagined but nevertheless mappable forms begins to arise; so, at a certain moment in the mid-19th century it becomes possible to think the end of another historical "moment", that of Man. The end of Humanism, a tradition apparently going back a number of centuries, according to this argument which is made in structuralist terms akin to those used by Krauss, in fact only dates back to the late 18th century, with the rise of a particular set of ideas, question and disciplines known as the Sciences of Man - all of which focused on the human body as a scientifically knowable entity, and all of which maintained a face that the scientific investigation of Human nature would eventually lead to a just, equitable and peaceble brotherhood of Humanity.


Althusser's argument, quite simply, is that sometime just around 1948 - when he wrote the "Theses on Feurbach" (the last and greatest exponent of Humanism) and The Communist Manifesto, Marx was able to think the end of Man, to realize man is neither the apex of creation nor the perfection of nature, nor is Man even an entity which has a continuous and unified history which will eventually culminate in self-knowledge and self-actualization. Rather, Man is an ideological construct of relatively recent advent. I say 'advent', instead of 'invent', specifically because Marx, as Althusser constructs him, does not believe anyone in particular invented the myth of Human History. Rather, Human History arises as an "event", and takes the form a total "moment", a comprehensive structure outside of which it is not possible to think at all. Or, to say it contrariwise, it is only by fully mapping out the extended field within with the Human is but one term or position (and for that reason it can no longer be seen as a priviledged), that one is able to project the end of Man. One can only think the end of Man from within, and at a particular moment during, the History of Man. In other words, the critique of Man must be a radically immanent critique, because thought itself, consciousness itself, only exists within a structure.


To put it in psychoanalytic terms, which Althusser also admits to adopting, it is only possible to map the Unconscious from the position of consciousness. This is the fundamental difference between the early Marx and the later Marx, the early Marx and Althusser. The former believe in the original dignity and eventual sovereignty of Man. Ideology, according to this view, is a state of false consciousness into which humanity fell. In the middle of his essay, Althusser points out the two prevailing beliefs about this fall: 1) That of the 18th-century French philosophes was that false ideas has been foisted on the majority by the priest and despots in order to exploit them. God, here, is a weapon to crush. 2) That of the 19th-century German philosophers and historians (a veritable new science) was that false consciousness was a phase that humanity needed to pass through over the course of it natural development. God, here, is a fantasy construct through which humanity darkly contemplates its own image. Of course, for Althusser, both of these are wrong. Because each supposes that it is possible to overcome ideology, to start, "in the final instant", outside of ideology and come to consciousness per se. Hence, the obvious contrast is between false consciousness and free consciousness. What Althusser claims Marx saw, though still dimly because he lacked the methods and insights later furnished by structural anthropology, what the free consciousness was itself a form of false consciousness.


In fact, free consciousness, the belief that we are in control of our own minds and actions and destinies, is false consciousness par excellance. The very feeling, to put it as plainly as can be, that we have finally stepped free of all ideology and at last stand in the clear, this is the surest indication that in that very moment we have entered into Ideology completely. This, again, is the famous moment of recognition, the moment of the production of the $ubject, of his entry not into the relations of production but into the relationships of the relations of production; which Althusser calls "interpelation", or "hailing". It is both a total event which happens at various key moments in our individual lives, but even more importantly for Althusser, it is a ongoing process we repeat, moment by moment, every instant of our waking lives. Each time we say to ourselves not just, That's where I work; or, Now it's time to pay my bills and do my taxes; but indeed each time we say to ourselves, These are my pants and thank God the key are in the pocket; or, Man, I really feel like myself today; we are in that same instant hailed into $ubjectivity, as term which must be heard in its pure ambivalence.



Robert Gober
"Untitled" (1992)
Site-Specific Installation (2007)
At Schaulager, Basel
There is no outside to Ideology. In the same way the outside of the total social practice we call Text can only be thought as a logically necessary aspect of Text, one which must properly be understood as Not-Text; so the outside of the total social practice we call Enlightenment, or Freedom, can only be thought as a logically necessary aspect of the same structure which must be properly be understood as Ideology, or Necessity. As Lacan, so famously put it, "There is no other to the Other."

Coming up: Alternative Sciences and Immanent Critique

/Cloud/

Helene Cixous' declaration that "Everything will change when woman gives woman to the other woman" is an example of a grammatical form called the "middle voice" (El coche se vende.). Cixous uses it as a way of getting beyond traditional views of active and passive, or Subject and Object. Two examples of the kind dichotomous thinking she want to overcome are Aristotle's first and final causes, and Descartes' notion of rational engineering.

Consider the house above. Try to imagine not as a building which was designed by an architect for a client (in linguistic terms, not a purposeful message traveling between a "sender" and a "receiver"), but rather a structure, an utterance, which emerges gratuitously (as a "Gift") on its own, and develops in its own terms. No prior expectations about form, function or finish are in place, and so the house is free to develop interminably, as it will. That's exactly what most confused me about Gehry's corrugated-aluminum and chain-link buildings when i first saw them. Walking by the construction site, I couldn't imagine why it took the builders so damn long to complete a simple structure, until an architect friend of mine pointed out that the building was "done". What I took to be scaffolding, barriers and a foreman's mobile office was in fact the "finished" building. To have renovated this construction would have been no different from building it in the first place. The initial building was already an alteration. This is a very different way of viewing "living space": no longer as simply neutral Cartesian isometric space which you simply live it, space now is itself dynamic, alive.

Something I wrote to one of my freshman comp students:

I like very much your idea of comparing the clearly outmoded Architecture and Planning building here at the U to those of other programs on campus. I was a bit surprised you wouldn't have mentioned the Marriott dance building, because that is such a wonderful example of a building designed for a specific purpose, and which has aged wonderfully well. Also, I'm a bit concerned about your idealization of classic style, which reads a bit too much like von Humboldt.

...Rather than returning to romantic notions about the perfection of Greco-Roman culture, you might (as a truly 'catholic' planner) want to turn your attention to the medieval notion of design, building and use. If you consider the great cathedrals of Europe, you'll notice that these are structures which, for all that hey are unmistakably grand building projects, nevertheless everywhere violate classical notions of finish. They were built over large stretches of time, and used by the public all the while they were under construction. And quite evidently their plans were revised over the course of their construction. Many began as fortress-like romanesque buildings (quite like the A+P building at present) but over time became increasingly ornate, glassy and gothic.

If you were to adopt this post-modern view of things, you would be able to suggest that our our Architecture and Planning Building at the U, horribly outdated, not be completely overhauled, but rather put into a state of permanent revision, quite a bit like the Robert Morris title (which I've borrowed for the name of one of my class livejournals) suggests: Continuous Project Altered Daily. This is a concept you could address in terms of Aristotle's distinctions between contraries and contradictions: Some would assert that an architectural structure is either complete or incomplete, but rather than thinking in terms of such contraries, I would suggest that the same problem can be understood in terms of a contradiction. A building, then, might be considered as neither constructed or under construction but rather in a permanent phase of de-construction, or perpetually "under revision". Suddenly, cranes and scaffolding are no longer mere ugly nuissances, but rather occasions for us to perceive alternative forms of beauty and functionality, and to re-think building in terms of time in addition to eternity.

This is precisely what's going on right now with the Marriott Library, which is being modified even while it is in use. It strikes me that the A+P building might be the best place to educate the entire campus community with regard to the anti-modernist idea that finish is not the norm but rather the occasional exception, and that perpetual construction and demolition is in fact a more honest assessment of how cultures and their architecture actually live.

But to return to your own remarks, I think what you're saying about the impossibility of distinguishing between inside and outside in the Gehry house is entirely correct. This is a house while is all surface, but without any real inside or outside. This mode of construction is certainly what you see in the earlier Gehry works. By constrast, what you see in the later ones, those which made Gehry an architectural rockstar, is a different sort of confusion, or inversion: the reversal of background and foreground. Whereas /architecture/, or /space/, in the perspectival tradition, had been understood an established rational form outside of which loomed its irrational other, /cloud/; now, in Gehry's more recent works, /cloud/ is brought to the fore, while /architecture/ and /space/ are made radically to retreat and function merely as a ground against, or within, which /cloud/ can suddenly appear and hover. And, if you think about it, if not neo-mannerism, quite possibly such as reversal could be understood as a kind of neo-baroque "theatricality" (think Fried), the kind of thing you might associate with Racine. We'll talk about this more when we get to Diderot's "Rameau's Nephew".

Finally, some images to prompt reflection:





Torelli, with some help from me.



Fontebasso, Francesco (Venice, Italy, 1707–1769)
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, c. 1749
Oil on canvas, 46 x 59 cm



Fontebasso, Francesco (Venice, Italy, 1707–1769)
Abraham and the Three Angels, c. 1750
Pen and brown ink over black chalk, red wash heightened with white



Lucilla Catania
"Ganci, Virgole e Doppie Punte," 1996
Galleria ARTRA,
Milano, Italy

Finally, have a look at these outrageous designs by Giuseppi Bibiena, in which /space/ and /cloud/ seem to merge together into one.

This is perfect day for reading Sei Shonagon.

Utagawa Hiroshige - 歌川広重
Oshashi Bridge & Atake In a Sudden Shower




James McNeil Whistler
Nocturne Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge




John Cage
"In A Landscape"
"Daughter of The Lonesome Isle"
"Suit for Toy Piano - pt. One"