No Dialog Required

Here's a thought about the internet... or maybe just blogs in general... they are not an interactive media, despite the possibility of the technology allowing for two way communication. It is the rare person who desires actual responses to anything they say online.

Evey now and then, when I read something on a blog that I find particuarly interesting,  I will send an email directly to the author. I will only do this when I have something interesting to add, or a good question to ask. I will take my time and write a solid email, taking pains to make it neither too long, nor too short... to not be too obvious or too obscure, and so on. I will applaud their work, frame my comments, and then add my own, or ask a question. I can't imagine that the author would mind engaging someone that had a strong connection to what they wrote.

Much to my disappointment, I find that these authors take very little interest in developing a dialog with me. I'm pretty sure that the writer wants their blog to be "hit".. and they want responses to blog entries to show up online... but that is not the same as a dialog. In this respect, they are exhibitionistic. It's as if they stand naked in a window, wanting to be seen... but if you knock on their door, they throw on their clothes and turn out the lights.

I further suppose that this same author (who I am generalizing here)... if they seek some perspective other than their own... will search for it using search engines. In this way, they become voyeuristic... they want to view others from the safe distance of the technology. The want to peak in the windows of others... but if they were invited in by the person they spy on... they run away.

Exhibitionism and voyeurism are a particular kind of bifurcated experience... an indirect contact... which isn't really contact at all. On the one hand, it is the EXPOSURE of exhibitionism... on the other hand it is the OBSERVATION of the voyeurism. But exposing and observing, when done in isolation, do not add up to human contact or communication.

On the internet, everything is mediated from behind the screen of technology. Voyeurism and exhibitionism. If this was someone's approach to sex, we'd say they might have intimacy issues... but online.. it's business as usual.

Chaotic Drawing

I bought a cheap sketch book, 6 inches by 9 inches.... Canson, 100 sheets, 65lb paper... whatever... the point is, it cost $4.50. I bought a cheap one so that I could make LOTS of fast sketches in public, without worrying about filling a "nice" sketchbook with fucked up drawings. I didn't want to overthink it, or worry about making a "good" drawing. I just sit in the park, or lean against a wall, or even just walk down the street... and I make very rapid drawings of people as they walk by.

The first day I did it (three weeks ago), I made 70 separate drawings in about 3 hours. Some of the drawings were not so good, but most were quite effective at capturing the attitude or gesture of the person being drawn. Sometimes I got the anatomy right... sometimes I drew the figure more like a cartoon... sometimes I exaggerated features like a charicature... and so on. The cool thing was... that by going after LOTS of sketches, rather than laboring over a single sketch, I am capturing a lot of interesting moments that would otherwise have been missed. This 100 page sketch book is nearly full now, and the sketches constitute a real study of the postures and attitudes of people in public.

Most interestingly in all of this are the discoveries I am making about people in public. The thing is (and I have mentioned this before) people in American never sit still. Everyone is always moving, always modifying their posture, always behaving in an anxious fashion. It is rare for someone to stand still. These quick drawings reflect this. On average, I'd say I have maybe 10 seconds MAX to register my impression of the person, before they either rapidly walk by, or before they change their posture (if they are sitting down).

Typically what I do is make a quick series of lines to register essential points on their body. After they have passed, I will invent missing parts, or maybe graft the missing parts from the next person that walks by.

Basically, it doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter because I am not after a refined drawing. And that is my insight... that a refined drawing or portrait IS NOT POSSIBLE, because the public person is not refined, not coherent, not stable. The physical anxiety displayed via endless movement is incommensurate with a stable identity. Why labor to draw such chaos in a controlled fashion? So instead, I simply draw what is perceptible to me in the very small window of time I have.... ten seconds or so.

If such a drawing is fractured, incomplete, inaccurate... then that is ok. In fact, it is more than ok... it is actually a good thing... because I am actually capturing the fleeting nature of such public encounters. Why demand that drawings of a figure in public be refined and complete, when NO SUCH interactions in life are refined or complete? I could say that the incompleteness of my drawings are actually what makes them honest.... that which is "inaccurate" about them is precisely why they are accurate.

I have to amend the earlier statement that refined drawings are not possible. Obviously they are, but only through INVENTION. One can invent the vast amount of information that is missed in a 10 second encounter on the street. That does not make such a refined drawing irrelevant, but it does VERY LIKELY make it less honest (in a way) than the rapid drawing. The rapid drawing registers only those strong impressions present in a flash of they eye.

It's like a drunken cab ride at 2 in the morning. As you lean your head against the window, and look up at the passing buildings at a funny angle... what is it that you will remember later. Probably not much. A series of fleeting impressions... bursts of neon and street lights.... strange moments here and there. Just raw impressions of the city at night.

You could go to your studio and reconstruct the experience into a coherent view of the city. You could bring a rational order to what was (in the experience of it) a chaotic experience. But what would be the point? What is it you would capture? That which exists chaotically needs a drawing method that can deal with that chaos. Drawing methods that required refined and rationalized methods CANNOT properly record chaos, because they require more processing than happens in 10 seconds. No... the drawing needs to RESPECT the incompleteness of perception... by allowing some way of recording incompleteness.

The rapid sketch accomplishes this. Such sketches serve as the basis for paintings. Such sketches can serve as the basis for more refined drawings. But what they can't do is BEGIN as refined drawings... or end up as refined drawings. The inaccuracies and exaggerations and missing elements in these sketches are AS IMPORTANT as that which is present. Such errors and omissions in the drawing are actually SELECTIONS you make within the 10 second window of time.. and so the short list of that which you include, and that which you don't... THAT is the truth of the chaotic moment.

Artworks and Scale

I woke up this morning with an interesting idea. I had been preparing some panels for painting the previous day. The panels were 48x30, so they were larger than usual. I chose that size because the  panel needs to be appropriate to the subject matter, and to the manner in which I will paint it.

Paintings that are small tend to be more detail oriented, and paintings that are larger tend to be less detailed. Of course, exceptions exist, but this seem generally true. The subject matter I have in mind for these panels is not heavy on details, and it needs to be of a size that is large enough to create a visceral impact that depends on size. The impact I have in mind could be achieved at 48x30 or larger. It could probably be created at 38x24. But it could not be created at 8x10 size. At a certain point, the painting is too small.

This observation is obviously nothing new. The artist knows that size matters. Size matters because the size of the artist (their physical stature) and the size of the world we live… asserts a real effect on how we produce artwork. A painting that is 8x10 inches will never be painted like a painting that is 8x10 feet. The manner of working will be dictated by size. But again, this is nothing new.

But what did strike me as new was this thought… that not only are art works size-dependent in their construction, but they are size dependent in the viewing.

When the artist makes a small painting, he will make it with "smallness" as part of his vision of it. He will stand in front of that small canvas and view it as a small thing, and make marks based on it's small size, and so on, and so on. When he is done, he has a small painting. Not just physically small, but small in the manner underlying construction.

When the artist makes a large painting, he stands before a large canvas, and his decisions and working methods are direct responses to that large scale. The size of the brushes changes, the brushwork changes, the larger gesture of the body can be incorporated. Areas of the canvas become "broader" in their conception. Things can be included that might be left out of a small painting. Things might be left out of the larger that were part of the smaller. And so on. Again, the artist is constructing a LARGE painting… not just physically large, but large in  the manner of its construction.

This is interesting. Artworks are related to size… and not just their physical size, but all those manners of construction that derive from size. I will refer to these as the "CONCEPTUAL" size.  The conceptual size is related to their physical size, and includes all those manners of working that come into play at whatever size you're working at. Large paintings employer conceptions of largeness, small paintings employ conceptions of smallness.

This means that the artwork needs to be viewed IN PERSON. Viewing large artworks in smaller photographic reproduction removes the scale of the piece. I had been aware of this (obviously), but I always associated scale with simply the physical size. It never occurred to me that one's response to the painting was dictated not simply by it's physical size, but by the fact that the CONCEPTUAL size… in other words…  the those manners of painting dictated by physical size

Small artworks that are viewed in larger photographic reproduction have the same problem.

The upshot of this is that to truly view and understand a work of art, we must view it in person, so that the manner of it's construction (how it was painted) can be absorbed by us relative to the physical size it presents to us. That is how the artist saw it in construction, and so it is the only legitimate way to view it as intended.

The compressions and expansions of the image via photographic reproduction confuse the mind. Typically, the photos are smaller than the work, and so we lose all sense of the works size-dependent meanings… and these size dependencies are fundamental formal concerns. Without this, there is only an imaged, divorced from the conditions of it's construction. In a sense, the photos turn the painting into a photograph.

Among the several things that makes a painting different from a photograph, are JUST SUCH conditions upon it's construction. Not only do paintings derive from drawing (vs. the mechanical reproduction of the camera)… but the drawing itself derives from the scale of the work. Photographic methods do not rely on scale, and are incapable of depicting the scale. Without scale,  a major formal concern is removed… and with it, the work itself… except of the image.

But what is this image? Without the ability to convey the formal realities of the artwork, such an image dramatically misrepresents the reality of the artwork.

Social Contexts for Art

I had a breakthrough regarding the requirements of creative work. It was precipitated by a dinner party from earlier in the summer, a party during which I unveiled an outdoor dining table that I had built by hand. The table had been designed and built over the course of the previous 4 days. I was under pressure to produce it quickly, specifically for the party. Naturally, I was proud of the table, and anxious to show it off to the dinner guests.

Upon hearing that I had built the table by hand, the guests voiced their appreciation and said how nice it was. They may have touched it or looked at it differently for a moment, but then they went right back to what they were talking about before… something about  their parents health problems, or about their jobs. That is exactly the way these things go. Somewhere in the collective subconscious, there is an unofficial list of topics that get discussed at dinner parties. Topics such as work, family, health, sports, television shows, vacations, and traffic are high on the list. This is disappointing, but typical.

As the conversation continued, I happened to observe that a beer glass sitting on the table was reflecting the objects behind it in a visually interesting way.  I got up and went to get my camera so that I could capture an image of it. My leaving the table took people by surprise and when I came back, the conversation came to a stop as people seemed confused as to why I had the camera. I told them to ignore me, and to just keep talking. They did, but their tone of voice suggested that they felt it was weird that I would being taking a photograph while seated at the table. Their unease bled into my own sense of bing isolated from the proceedings. I knew that my behavior was not orthodox. I rushed through the picture taking process and put the camera away as soon as possible.

This episode lit a fuse in my mind, which later (after the guests had gone) would detonate in a rush of mental connections. Several observations occurred to me in succession, each one leading to (and amplifying) the effect of the next one… and the succession was so rapid that the effect wasn't of a series of observations, but of a single, unified observation… i.e., an IDEA.  The following describes the several ideas that combined instantaneously.

*****

First, the party guests did no care that I built the table… because most people do not understands what it takes to make something by hand. Most people don't build things. Most lead consumer lives, wherein they work a job doing one thing… to make the money to then exchange with other people who do one thing… so that they can acquire the various things they need in their lives. This division of labor is economically efficient, but has the effect of removing people from the act of creation, and with it… the meanings associated with creation. Further refinements of production (in all spheres) drives out every possible inefficiency (i.e., evidence of human making) and replaces it with the sterile beauty of the machine made. Such inanimate beauty becomes the standard by which objects are judged.

When I announced that I had made the table by hand, the guests probably paid attention to it in a way they hadn't before. Before the announcement, they probably assumed it was purchased at the store. Upon learning it was handmade, their eyes are drawn to it's particulars, where they might have noticed a small irregularity typical of the hand built. At that point they probably downgraded it to "craft" object, and viewed it with the reassuring pity with which people view handmade Christmas gifts.

On top of that, to announce that you made something seems to puzzle people, who would rather that everyone be playing by unwritten rules of consumer society. But in making things, you announce you are outside the system of commodity production… that you desire to stamp your imprint on material life. Further, you announce that the commodity item is not good enough for you. And finally, you are showing that you have the ability to pull this off. Such implications can irritate people. They might think you are trying to one-up them, or that you think you're better than them. Maybe they think of their own lives, where they simply buy what is offered for sale… the product of other minds in the marketplace. The handmade items cuts against the grain of their value system.

A similar series of annoyances also registered when I had gotten the camera out to photograph the beer glass. As with hand-building a table, I was guilty of interpreting reality on my own terms… to turn the moment into an artistic production. This also cuts against the grain of the social conformity. Although there was every bit as much to talk about regarding taking a photo… that is not on the list of acceptable topics and activities for a dinner party. An open conversation about uncharted, personal reactions to the visual world is too dangerous… too revealing… too volatile to do in a group.

If people talk about art, it is never in a moment of creative thought… but rather… in a conformist moment of talking about officially sanctioned art culture. People are willing talk about museum visits or Picasso, but if you pull out your sketchbook to show them an image, they might-could care less. Probably they will downgrade your effort because it isn't as good as the Michelangelo drawing they once saw at the Met. If you hand them a pencil and say "let's make a drawing"… they will not try. Art, like everything else in their lives, is a commodity experience that is bought and sold in the marketplace… not something you do on your own.

Here's another example of the same behavior. Once upon a time I tried my hand at doing standup comedy. I attended a workshop, developed 10 minutes of material, and performed it onstage at a comedy club. I did OK. Myself and another guy from the workshop decided to hit up some open mic nights at area clubs to keep the comedy effort alive. Whenever I discussed this activity with regular people, they show no interest in comedy as an actual activity. Instead, they immediately describe their favorite comics… famous comics like Carlin, or Seinfeld, or Bill Cosby, or whoever. You know… the best of the best comics they had seen on television Again, they had no sense that the creativity of comedy comes from real people, in real moments... that it is a constructed, not simply consumed.

You can literally stand in front of such people and try to engage them in a moment of comedic creation… but they will not participate… they will not collaborate in the construction of humor. To them, comedy is some product that happens on TV. My very real participation in the art-form is marginalized (by them) by comparison to those famous TV comics, much in the way that my table was marginalized in relation to some "perfect" table in a furniture catalog, or that a sketch is marginalized relative to a master artist of the past. The alienation of these non-creative people animates nearly all social contexts, leaving us awash in a world with little room for free, creative play of the mind.

Later in the evening, after we went back inside and sat in the living room, another thing occurred to me. You see, Margaret plays the piano. I play the guitar and the bass guitar. I like to sing. I like music. In fact, everyone seems to like music. But in all the years I have been in social situations people, nobody ever pulls out an instrument and plays it… or makes music… or sings. Never. Well… maybe a few times Margaret played a Christmas carol on the piano, or played a short classical piece.

But even the few times this does happen, the audience (not all of whom were enthusiastic) begin to fidget in their seats, seemingly anxious for the display of art to end so that they can get back to socially acceptable actives. Oddly enough, when the brief piano playing ends, people will talk enthusiastically about how nice it was, or about their cousin who plays piano, or about how their parents once owned a piano, or about how they saw a piano concert last week. These are all socially acceptable forms of discourse regarding music. But what they will never do, is ask to make music, or listen to you make music.

In general, the logic of social interaction DOES NOT ALLOW FOR CREATIVE EFFORT. People don't sing together, don't make music together, don't explore visual art together…. they don't photograph in the moment. They also do not construct comedy together… or explore experimental or subversive thoughts. They don't challenge each other, or make creative arguments, or produce visionary statements about the nature of their life and the world at large. Creativity AS SUCH is simply not on the menu within the social context of a dinner party.

NOW… consider that creativity is also not on the menu for MOST SOCIAL CONTEXTS. Family, friends, school, work, church, paper route, sports, going to the post office, buying a hot-dog at the Wawa. Consider the endless things we do… both big and small… and how so much of it goes down in social contexts that do not require creativity and do not support it, not even a little bit. Now consider that our lives are spent immersed in an endlessly rotating series of such social contexts… then you begin to get the full impact of the creative poverty that exists all around us. The effects of such poverty is overwhelming. It gets into us like a bad odor.. into our pores, into our clothes, in to our minds. It grinds us down all the time.

You may want to get out the sketch book and draw… but between the idea of doing that, and the actual reality of doing it, lies (probably) a series of conventionalized distractions that suck you into non-creative social contexts. Nearly everyone you know and everything you do is NON CREATIVE. They do not participate in a social-context of creative effort. The world is full of non-creative contexts, and the limitless stream of people making them up.

Those are the observations… here is the central idea… followed by related ideas through which I will ramble.

THE IDEA

One cannot engage in meaningful artistic work if one does not have some social context in which to exist as an artist. By "social context"  I mean… the coming together of people for some active purpose… including the reason the activity is being done and the manner of judging it's success. The social group provides ideas, support, and critical feedback.

Everything that gets done in this world takes place within some social construct that is understood by the participants. The most obvious example is work. People go to their jobs and exist within the social context of their particular workplace. Without such a context, they would not be productive. If everyone went to work each day and had to reinvent the reason they were there, nothing would ever get done. So instead, the workplace takes on certain characteristics that allow for a sustainable continuity of productive effort.

Again, everything people do takes place within a social context. Family life, religious participation, diner parties, schooling, entertainment, going to bars, dating women. Anything and everything is done in some way that has precedents in society…  that is, some expected way to engage in it.  Without such social contexts, 95% of the people would not be able to construct contexts of their own. They would wind up wandering the countryside like zombies.

None of this seems problematic until you want to engage in something that has no social context. The life of an artist is very close to this situation. Certainly there are known formulas for being an artist. For instance, art school itself provides a social context for making art. When you're in school, the making of art takes place in a social context that breathes relevance into what you're doing. This can be continued through MFA programs, and then into an artistic life based on teaching within an art institution. What such an approach might lack in imagination it makes up for in practicality.

Other socially recognized contexts for art making include… the female artists marrying a wealthy man to provide for them… craft artists selling stylized objects with broad appeal… and artists who mimic the prevalent high-art styles, and who network within the art-world.

These social contexts are all very practical for those who enter into them. We might reject them for various reasons… and we might also reject a dozen other social contexts for art… but what is harder to reject is the need for a social context at all. They say it's better to be alone than in bad company, and that seems generally true. But the goodness or badness of the company one keeps is less relevant to the artist than that one is keeping company at all. To keep no company… to be isolated… will lead to failure.

This is a very real problem, because as an artist, it is very possible to find oneself without a social context in which to make art. This is not the case for (let's say) an accountant.. who not only ALWAYS works within a social context… but NEVER works outside of one. In fact, the VERY NATURE of being an accountant is defined by the social construct. You never hear about an accountant "working outside the system"… or "doing accounting on their own". What would such a person do?

All of the functions performed in society have corresponding social contexts that define the activity and judge it's success. Everything except art, that is. Art is the one activity in society that doesn't derive from and appeal to the mass judgements of society.  That is the beauty of it, and the danger in it. Given this ambiguous connection between art and society, the artist has to invent his own reason for existing. That is the function of a social context. But when none of the aforementioned social contexts for art are a good fit for you, where do you turn?

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Switching gears for a minute….

I worked for many years as a computer programmer. Over the years I became aware of a tendency of the people in that profession (mostly males) to treat each other in a coldly logical, non-human manner. Everything was subjected to impersonal, logical analysis. The dominant mode of thought in the profession (logic) had imprinted a controlling alignment of attitude toward all issues in life. The emotional landscape in such a culture is bleak and depressive for all involved. I formulated the following description of the problem… "Just because one works with machines, does not make one a machine".

I could extend this logic to the making of art. Because the visual arts are predominantly a solitary activity (as far as making the art goes)… that doesn't mean that artists have to exaggerate that aspect of isolation and (in so doing) construct a culture of alone-ness. But that is exactly what many do. I suppose the logic is this… that if in making art I am alone in my studio… then nothing other than myself is relevant. If the dominant mode of art making is isolated activity, then everything is about maintaining isolation.

For the artist who embraces such an ethos… no social context exists for their art making. The best an artist could wish for in such a scenario is that they have some outlet for their work once it is made… such as a gallery to sell it in, or some venue to display it. But those are contexts for selling the work, not making it. And even those contexts require a kind of involvement with others that the Artist-As-Loner ethos works against.

Furthermore, the isolationist strategy is not realistic for the emerging artist, who very likely has no business contacts or business savvy. To be isolated both in the making and selling of art is to be entirely isolated. Which brings me back to where I started… which is… how can an artist be expected to be productive when he has no social context in which to operate?

I suppose that it is THEORETICALLY possible that some human being might exist on the planet earth that can make art despite total isolation. But I don't know if this person actually exists. The "isolated but productive artist" might only be a theoretical possibility... based on the fact that people have free will, and can somehow WILL themselves to push through all the natural barriers that isolation brings to productive work. But if you look at the history of art, very few significant artists have operated in even relative isolation, let alone total isolation. Even those who are popularly assumed to have been total loners (such as Van Gogh) were actually (upon closer inspection) more tied into social contexts than the Romantic myth of "artist as outsider" would have us believe.

I can imagine a counter argument to this idea that goes like this…. "Despite what you say, I am productive making artwork in total isolation". Assuming such a person exists, I might answer... "Who cares"? I mean that literally… as in… "other than yourself, who cares about the things you create"? The immediate comeback would then have to be something like… "I don't care who else cares"… or "It doesn't matter that no one else cares".

But if nobody else cares, then there is no audience for the work. There is nowhere to display it… to sell it… to put in out there in front of society. To this last observation, the stubborn isolationist artist can say… "Well, I don't care. I don't make art to be displayed, I only make it for myself".

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Let's think about that for a moment…. "I ONLY MAKE ART FOR MYSELF"

How is one to understand such an admission? Why should art be made only for the self? Or, in general, what factors might be considered in how art is MADE and USED?  To think about this, the following distinctions about making and use are necessary.

1. MODES OF MAKING ART OBJECT = isolated vs. social context
All art is (in the making of it) an individualized activity.
This means that isolated art isn't simply art made by an individual, but rather, art for which the artist does not draw upon a social context for ideas, support, or critical feedback. They operate in a very strongly isolated context. Likewise, social-context art is also (in the making of it) an individualized activity. The difference between it and isolated art is that the social-context artist exists within some social context from which he draws ideas, support, and critical feedback.

2. MODES OF DISPOSITION OF ART OBJECT => private vs. public
By "disposition" of the art object, I mean… where does the art end up, and what function does it serve.The earlier discussion was about the making of art, and described the opposed modes of isolation vs. social context. The corresponding modes of disposition of art seem to be (a) keeping the art private vs. (b) making the art public.

I believe that the modes of art making (isolated vs. social context) strongly determine the disposition of the art object (private vs. public).

If we combine the modes of making and the modes of disposition we come up with four combinations.

   A. isolated artist who keeps art object private.
   B. social context artist who makes art object public.
   C. isolated artist who makes art object public.   D. social context artist who keeps art object private.


I believe that the first two are more likely, and the last two less likely.


More likely….
    A. isolated artist who keeps art object private.
    B. social context artist who makes art object public.

Less likely….
   C. isolated artist who makes art object public.
   D. social context artist who keeps art object private.

Let's consider the "less likely" combinations first, and show how they are unlikely to exist.

Consider scenario C, the isolation artist who desires to make art object public.
Even if such an isolation artist wants to make his art public, where would the support for such art come from? Let's not cheat here by pretending that the isolation artist is secretly eavesdropping on spirited artistic debates within a social context he refuses to officially be part of. The isolation artist has to be understood as someone who is substantially isolated from the real effects of social contexts. Obviously, the extent of isolation can vary… so the statement can be refined to this… to the extent that the artist is isolated from the real effects of social contexts for art making, the less relevant his artwork will be to the world outside himself.

Consider scenario D, the social context artist who keeps the art object private.
This seems counter-intuitive. The artist who utilizes a social context for ideas, support, and critical feedback… is thereby part of some larger footprint of meaning in the world outside themselves. Such a footprint may be tiny in comparison to other footprints… but it at least assures them of some audience (if only two other people). Given that their work is emanating from some shared intellectual perspective, it is unnatural that such an artist would break that shared connection by keeping the work private.

Seeking a social context is consistent with external display of the art object, if only to the inner circle of other artist who comprise that social context.  This works the other way too… such that the desire for public display implies some social context that one wants to participate in. One can deny that last conclusion, but consider this… If one produces art in isolation and then displays it, such an act draws into sharp relief the urgent question of why one is displaying art to a public that one doesn't respect. If one cares so little for others as to not involve them in thinking about art, why bother to show them the art?  Some artists might want to sell the work, or get praise…. but such motives have no intellectual function… and cannot sustain the activities of a serious artist.

In general, the desire for public display goes hand-in-glove with seeking out a social context for art making… and vice versa… that making art within a social context leads to relevant public display. Likewise, an indifference to public display goes hand-in-glove with isolation… and vice versa… making art in isolation leads to keeping the artwork object private.

The improbability of these less likely scenarios proves (by implication) the more likely scenarios.
      Scenario A: Isolation (in the making of art) tends toward private consumption of the art object.
    This is probably true because the opposite (scenario C) is unlikely.

      Scenario B: Social context (in the making of art) tends toward public consumption of the art object
    This is probably true because the opposite (scenario D) is unlikely.

I think this demonstrates that the likely scenarios are INDEED likely, and should be taken as a generally true. To what use an artist can put this is unclear… but I hope that AT LEAST it can dispense with the stubborn notion that working isolation is intellectual relevant, and can lead to a relevant public display.


*****

In the above analysis, the motive for making art was either (a) for personal reasons only, or (b) for personal reasons AND for public display. These are two radically different motives for art making.

The motive for making the art object public derives from a need to assert oneself into the world. Motives for this could vary. It could be pure ego and exhibitionism. It could be (on the other extreme) the desire to cooly articulate some view of the world in a detached and transparent manner. But motives aside, the public artist must have something relevant to express about the world. The quest for relevancy will take the artist outside of their own minds… out into the world around them. There, they will encounter a public discourse that they can engage in, or else reject. But if they reject all manner of public discourse, they isolate themselves thereby, which puts them in conflict with their desire to express in an extroverted manner… i.e., have a public display of their art. That conflict will resolve toward one of the two modes… either the isolation/private mode, or the social-context/public-display mode. If it is toward the latter, then the desire for public display mates with the need for engaging a social context… i.e., a public forum of ideas, support, and critique.

The motive for keeping the art object private is quite different. By it's nature, it is not designed to assert oneself in the world. It's purpose is therefore introverted. It serves only the needs of the mind of the creator. Perhaps it engages the artist by presenting them with a puzzle that must be solved. Perhaps it helps the artist expunge thoughts and feelings from their subconscious in a way that is not otherwise possible. These (and other) introverted motives fall under the category of "therapeutic motives". They are therapy for our minds and our lives. Their reason lie only in our selves. They have no requirement to draw from social context, or to present their object for public display.

The private artist is stigmatized as using art as therapy, which suggests that the artist is psychologically weak. The presumption of weakness is NOT simply the need for therapy…. after all… many public artists make work that has obvious therapeutic overtones. The weakness is that the private artist will not push up against the external world and engage it… as if they are too fragile to allow the challenge of public discourse into their minds. This criticism of the private artist is made by the art establishment, who control the views of such things. They control the view precisely because they engage in the public discourse of what things mean. The private artist is mute on the issue precisely because they don't. The private artist is left to either enter the public forum and debate the judgement that is passed on them… or to retreat further into the position of "I don't care". Typically, they retreat… because they don't care about what is said about them… and probably (because they don't care) they aren't generally aware of the criticism to begin with. In either case… they disappear from public life and from the world of art.


**********

A major stumbling block in the mind of the artist is the assumption that seeking a public display is somehow artificial, and that it involves the artist in trying to please OTHER people…. leading to work that sells out to some vague public desire. This is indeed possible. However, selling out to a vague public desire IS NOT equivalent to public display.

Consider this… do you find it artificial when you display your work to other artists who are close to you… with whom you can share confidences and critical ideas? Probably you don't. Some artists actually do. Apparently they are so inwardly drawn and vulnerable to even the most intimate and well meaning critique that they are incapable of public display at all. But this is an extreme case. Their aversion to public display has nothing to do with artificiality or selling it. Rather, they are simply terrified. Their terror is irrelevant and so are they.

But if you not terrified, but are legitimately concerned with not being artificial and selling out, then how do you avoid this without becoming an isolationist? I think the answer lies in considering what gives rise to the "vague public". The public is vague because they have no specific identity. As a group, all these non-specific people floating around society share no common ideology. Therefore, no artwork presented to such a group could connect with them. This gives the artist no basis for making the work, no confidence that it matters, and (peripherally) little hope for selling work.

To alleviate these problems, that artist would have to come up with some idea of what the public wants. In the absence of anything specific, all that is left is to make presumptions about artist tastes of the general public. A short-list would include such categories as… landscape… representational… impressionistic… colorful. But these categories are (the artist knows) simply trite, historical generalizations. Because the public is not sophisticated (probably) they are drawn to these culturally induced simplifications of what art is.

If this was only solution, then it is DEFINITELY a sellout to have public display. If the only audience and motive for making art was to hit such a watered down target, then relevant public display is not possible. MANY artists do exactly this, and you see it all the time. There is TONS of work which channels popular tastes in order to appeal to the broad, non-specific market.

By a strange twist of logic, I think this Sell-Out-Scenario is EXACTLY the fate that most isolation artists will find themselves in if they seek public display. Because the isolation artist seeks no social context, they are building no network for relevant public display. Therefore, their desire to display can only be satisfied by appealing to mass tastes. Some isolation artists work is too weird for that, so they are doomed again. But many who operate in isolation can and do appeal to the mass public. After all, how hard is it to sit in isolation and know that people like impressionistic landscapes? You don't need a network of intellectually challenging artist to come up with that. So here's what you end up with… working in isolation (no critical stimulation) selling cliched artwork work to the public (no critical consciousness). Isolation art and selling out… a perfect match.

So the challenge is to have public display that isn't based on appealing to a vague public. The only way to achieve this is to have a social context for art making, and to leverage that into public displays for a small (non mass market) but select audience. In practical terms, the social context has to come first, and the connections to  opportunities for public display will flow from that. The only alternative is to sell out, or never display work at all…. both of which are artistic death.

**********

These arguments can go on much longer. The isolation artist can find more and more ways to specify why isolation is equally relevant to social context art. The various points of argument presented here can all be unpacked and argued in more complex ways. But I think that even allowing for such expansion, the overall point has been made. So instead of trying to prove anything further with yet more arguments that could (again) be unpacked endlessly, I would rather change direction and talk about common observations that shed light on what I'm talking about.

**********

The first observation is that the isolation artist has to produce a complex argument to defend his isolationist strategy. And though the logic of such an argument can be laboriously constructed, it seems (in the end) to be a universe of denial within a larger world that sees social-context as the basis for all advanced developments in every field. In other words… in all things, we observe that the engagement of social contexts for ideas, support, and critical feedback seems to produce the optimal efforts from all involved… or at least a far better effort than if they are left to their own devices. Why should art be exempted from such social logic?

I suspect that this lies in the Romanticist notion of the artist as outsider… where art is thought to emanate solely from each person's particular "genius" and naiveté (who they are uniquely) … both of which are crushed upon contact with the corrupting influences of the exterior world. The desire to keep oneself PURE in this manner is utterly Platonic… viewing the world as a duality between the pure and the impure… between perfect forms and their imperfect reflections in the actual world. Regardless of the merit and meaning of such a philosophy… and even granting that many artists couldn't even articulate Plato's theories… the cultural legacy of such dualism (being written into modes of thinking that people embrace unknowingly)  is to cut off truth from the real world. In art, this has produced a long tradition of "purification" strategies, which pit the artist against the outside world. I think the isolation-artist is part of this tradition.

But why do this? Why isolate oneself in the face of the obvious downside to being outside all system.  I'm not talking about being outside of particular systems, or particular points of view. Obviously there are terrible points of view that one wouldn't want to be part of.  I'm talking about being outside of any system… of being removed from any social-context. The isolation is numbing and destructive of creativity.

**********

As if all this isn't bad enough, consider this…. that even if one rejects social-contexts within art…. one cannot reject social-context in every other area of life. Everything else that happens all around us is being driven by some social logic… and this logic washes over us all the time… like radiation. We are faced with endlessly repetitive social contexts that don't' allow for creativity. It seems to me that the ONLY chance for the artist is to find (or more likely) construct a social context for art.

For the creative or artistic type… having been so long faced with uninspiring social contexts… they probably have adopted psychological isolation as a means to avoid being driven mad. Further, they have probably come to view any social group as being bad. This handicaps the artist greatly, as they have cut themselves off from connection to ideas, support, and critical feedback that they could get from an appropriate social context.

One has to be strong… one has to have fortitude and vision. But without a social-context for creative expression… is it possible at all? Can one exist totally isolated against a backdrop of a non-creative, post-modern, conformist life, yet still be a productive creative force? What superhuman requirement does that place on us? And though super-humanity is a glamorous notion, is it a relevant goal? Or is it simply the fantasy we engage in to sooth the transition from wanna-be artist, to the failed-artist, who was martyred by the cruel world. If victory in such matters is the priority… if succeeding at art and getting your vision out there is the goal… I think the bullshit and fantasies and Romantic notions of noble isolation have to be rejected in favor of something that has half a chance. I've been arguing that this "something else" is a social-context for creative thought and activity.

But because artists might typically be isolationists and introverted, such a shift to a more public consciousness (as required for developing social context) necessarily involves them in a radical reorientation in their thinking about how to work with others. That is the topic of PART TWO of this essay.

Hard Rock Absurdity

Click, click, click… ahhhhhh….. the Palladia music channel is showing Pink Floyd in concert. Something recent, as they are all old. They're playing "Breath" from Dark Side of the Moon. I really loved that song. But honestly, I loved the version I had on an old, blue Memorex mix-tape in 1982.  There's something about the clickity-clack of the cassette experience that felt more real than the effortless remote-control experience that channel-surfed me to this moment. And sure, cassettes are old and don't sound so good anymore. But they sound a lot better than this shit.

Jazz musicians get cooler with age. Blues musician get cooler with age. Rock musicians do not. They get worse… much worse… all the way bad. Having suckled at the GIANT TEAT of popular fame for so long… having milked it so dry… having toured and toured and packed stadiums and had breakups and outrageous personal histories… and in general having passed through every stage of mega-stardom stupidity… they arrive on the other side culturally exhausted and meaningless.

The flame that burns twice as bright may certainly burn half as long, but in the case of rock stardom, it burns ten times brighter… and the intensity of the burn not only consumes every resource within the artist, but exhausts those resources completely. In the end there is nothing left… only the burnt ash cinders of their Stratocasters. In time there arises undead from that tumultuous grave the endless string of periodic mega-tours… the rock star afterlife. Arrogant, self-aggrandizing vanity projects before a middle aged fan base all too eager to shell out big bucks for tickets.

Such scenes are cultural in this sense… that they actually happen in our world. But they are very middlebrow. They reflect the commodification of the music, and the inability of the viewer to find any thing new in the world, such that they have to reengage the past to stave off boredom in the present. It's a symptom of what the culture lacks, not culture itself. Or, by that logic... it's a culture defined by what isn't there.

Click, click, click… ahhhhh…. there's David Gilmore again… in front of massive outdoor stadium crowd.. singing something-or-other. The stage is completely black, spotlit dramatically from above as he crouches over his guitar like a sorcerer staring into a crystal ball. A full orchestra in the wings lays down lush thematics, as the smoke machine constructs the necessary mythology.  Jesus H Christ!!! If the psychological weight of Dark Side had ANY MEANING AT ALL… it is all lost in this venue. How can you sing "Money" with any integrity to 50,000 fans who paid big bucks to sit in a stadium to hear you sing about the absurdity of money?

Roger Waters should write an album called The Dark Side of the Dark Side of the Moon. But nobody really wants to hear that either. Late career albums describing the down side of fame are an embarrassment… like middle aged men crying on the shoulders of their twenty-one year old girlfriends, while she texts friends behind his back. They should just date someone their own age. And if that's too boring, then maybe they're too boring too. And so all the boring shit in the world gets recycled onto the Palladia channel… Pink Floyd, Bad Company, Queen, and so on. There they stand in pudgy splendor, extending every song to opus lengths worthy of Springsteen at his most boring, as the crowd goes wild upon the inevitable crescendo and thunderous last note.

I think I have more admiration for Blue Oyster Cult playing "Don't Fear the Reaper" before 300 people at Hershey Park, than the Stones doing their 10,000th performance of Jumpin' Jack Flash at the Superbowl. Why don't they just produce a hologram of the Stones playing Satisfaction and play it 24/7 in every town square in America. It could be the new national anthem. And every time you looked at it a sensor would register your eye movement and deduct 99 cents from your EYE-tunes account. Ha ha.

Click click click… ahhhhhh… Oh my god... Palladia is now showing a Rolling Stones video. I watch with the sound off in order to deconstruct the visual logic. In the video, The Stones are playing in some super-cool dive-bar aesthetic, squeezed onto a tiny stage being very Stones-ey. The club patrons are young and beautiful... essentially they are models hired for the video shoot. Their lithe sexual bodies gyrate in languid dance moves. We are to understand that The Stones have seduced them with music and attitude. Such is the power of The Stones to channel the primal desires of every generation.

Mind you... we are not supposed to think the patrons know that these are The Rolling Stones. The Stones are playing it as if they are just some ordinary band on stage... but that they are so inherently cool that even kids FORTY YEARS younger than them ignore the age difference and make a psychic and sexual connection with them. This includes connections with Keith Richards, who hides his craggy face behind sunglasses that have some kind of silver bangle dangling off the side. At one point he smiles devilishly, revealing crooked teeth. Ron Wood winks to a girl, who is transfixed. Of course, Jagger dances directly into the camera, essentially breaking the 4th wall, and letting us know that he knows we're watching. He aggressively engages the video viewer... because Mick cannot be seen without seeing you first.

REEKING PHONY PATHETIC

Every major rock act will (when interviewed) express the desire to get back to their roots and play small clubs…. just like when they started out. But such conceits on materialize as fantasy within music videos. When it comes to reality, they only every play the largest stadiums possible. The bands usually claim it's an unfortunate compromise required to allow all of their fans to see them. But the truth is that within the culture of the music industry, it is a sign of weakness and failure to take a step back from profit maximization.

Top acts become top acts through ambition and business savvy. They do not accept anything less than what they can get. They do not walk away from the big payday in order to pursue a project like playing smaller venues. As required, they will pull the old amps out of storage and call forth their old manager, who awakens from his disco-slumber to begin hard-balling everyone in sight for max money.

When the whole corporate, big money, mass media juggernaut finally rolls into your town and delivers the guitar god onto the smoke filled stadium stage... and as the 100 foot high monitors show images of the performer who is too small to see from 80% of the seats... then nothing is left to complete the absurdity than that the performers will muster all their practiced earnestness to sing socially conscious songs derived from ideologies so far in everyone's past as to be non-existent.

Click click click… ahhhh…. It's the end of the world, as we know it.

The invention of philosophy

Philosophy was invented because people disagree with each other. Think about it. If you hold an idea in your mind, that means you believe it to be true. If everyone agrees with you, then you never have a conflict. Imagine then that one day someone disagrees with you. They tell you that you're wrong. It might come as quite a shock. The first time it happens you might try to convince them by arguing the particular facts in question. The second time it happens you might do the same thing. But if people continue to disagree with you, it might occur to you that either you are wrong, or they are wrong, or both of you are wrong. This might lead you to consider how one goes about proving who is right or wrong. This might lead you to consider what truth and falsehood mean. What is truth in general? What is falsehood in general? How does one prove anything to be true or false. And so on.

And thus you are forced by the circumstance of being disagreed with, to search beyond the moment... beyond the particular facts... and to consider the particular more abstractly.

Throwing up my Naked Lunch

I read Naked Lunch based on it's reputation, on a long, drunken plane ride to San Francisco about ten years ago. At first it was slow going, as my mind groped for some feature of the story upon which to construct my understanding… like searching for a handhold in the dark, on a cliff. But any hold you find lasts only a paragraph or two. Even within the span of sentence your handhold crumbles, and you slide down… desperately flailing your arms about in the hopes that the next moment or sentence will provide something to grab hold of. But all grips are fleeting, and you are left pinwheeling through a series of false features that promise security, but never deliver.

After about the eighth beer, the inhibitive presumption of a rational universe melted away, and I could meet Naked Lunch where it truly existed… as a feverish, non-rational, evacuation of mental content from a mind gone haywire.  Naked Lunch is the topographical description, in literary terms, of a mind lost in drug addiction. It is a series of flash-backs, fragmented memories, and random associations dancing on the surface of the totality of one man's drug addled experiences. It is like an electroencephalogram… those electrical patterns that indicate brain function, but that don't describe what one is actually thinking about. We see the neurons firing… we see the lightning bolts of electricity shooting around the brain.. but what does it mean... what is the lab rat actually thinking about?

But even that neurological simile is inaccurate, since we presume that the electrical patterns could (if we learned how to interpret them) provide us with insight to some underlying idea of what the brain is thinking about. But when the underlying brain activity are insane flights of fantasy… an extreme products of volition… the trail of causality goes cold. The insane is always constructed from the ruble of the sane, collaging appropriated fragments into some representation. Presented with this representation, we do the only thing a human mind can do... we look for meaning. And that is the first mistake.

We cannot turn off our minds when we read Naked Lunch. All we can do is suspend that part of the brain that searches for answers. It's not really possible, but getting drunk is a useful approximation. Perhaps dropping acid would be better. But ultimately, it is an impossible task. At the very least, we must be conscious to read Naked Lunch… we must be lucid enough to comprehend the words. We could reduce our minds to such a low level that we view the letters of the words as simply graphical symbols... where they become opaque ends in themselves, not the transparent mechanism of ration thought. But we cannot go all the way there. We must still consider the words as having intended conceptual meaning. In the end, it is impossible both to write a work of total nonsense, and to read a book of total nonsense.

But you can get really close. Naked Lunch gets really close. In face, as a matter of epistemological clarity… you might assert that Naked Lunch is the standard by which nonsense texts could be judged. It is as nonsensical as humans can get in language. Since words are a product of reason, their use (like the appropriation of fragments from the real world) imbues writing with some content that can be interpreted… from which some conclusion can be drawn. 

But I never drew any conclusion from Naked Lunch, other than what I say here about it.  Perhaps that is the truest test of nonsense… that after it is all said and done, there is nothing to say other than that nothing was said. 

*****

A question always arises in reviews such as this, where we wonder if something isn't being given unearned legitimacy through the act of saying it has no legitimacy. This may be so, in which case the review ends up not being about the inherent relevance of the work, but of the social relevance that has grown up around it. This book has become celebrated for various reasons, and is therefore taken seriously, despite it's apparent lack of meaning. This is  completely maddening to the objectively minded, who presume a book (or any work) should derive it's meaning by how well it channels some aspect of reality, and not by having become cool or popular through some unspecified social mechanism.

Such social relevance (like celebrity status), once achieved, is long endured. Oddly enough, the less objective the social status, the brighter it glows, and the more maddening to consider by the objective minded... who in their protestations keep the spotlight on the very thing they wish to ignore.

I undertook to read Naked Lunch because I had heard so much about it. After a few pages I had the distinct impression that it was going nowhere. After a few more pages I knew it was going nowhere. But being trapped in a plane with a beer in my hand left me few options but to read on. I was determined to finish the book, despite the pain induced by plowing through page after page of incomprehensible writing. I just wanted to be able to say I read it. I wanted to know absolutely that I it made no sense. I didn't want to run into a future conversation where some jack-off tells me... "Oh, but it is the last 50 pages that are really great".

So I have the dubious status of being able to assert with conviction that an apparently incomprehensible book is in fact incomprehensible, or nearly so... and perhaps I could dissect it to reveal something about it... which leaves me wide open to the charge of taking it too seriously. Which is true from an objective point of view, but not from a social point of view. The need to understand nonsense doesn't stem from reality... it stems from society.

For example... might know that the emperor is naked, and choose to not participate a the public display of fawning over his new clothes... but if we live in such a society we are not immune from the effects of those social attitudes. To understand society, we have to at least focus our attention on the products of social attitudes, such as the high regard given Naked Lunch. The awareness that they are meaningless is the first thing that comes to mind, and on the basis of this you could turn away from it and announce that it is meaningless, and just continue on with one's personal agenda in life.

But if you can stomach to analyze it further... if you can choke back the bile in your throat... if you can handle thinking about something beyond the moment it is immediately relevant to your life or to objective reality... then you can enter the realm of the social. It's a creepy place for someone who is inherently individualistic and ego driven. And oddly enough, when you take "the social" seriously for what it is... you can hear in it the echo of yourself... or maybe more accurately... you can hear in yourself the echos of what society has wrought... because society has wrought each of us. No matter how closely guarded and and nurtured one is about themselves as a unique individual, we are all in large measure the product of society. To be ignorant of the social forces active in ourselves is to mistake those social influences for our own... to assume that the entire content of our soul has been constructed by us through a closely guarded screening of reality, when in fact the very screen we filter through is itself constructed for us by the society we grow up in.

Investigating the apparent nonsense of social product is not about celebrating nonsense, but of gaining some familiarity the socially sanctioned canon of nonsensical works. Kind of like the inverse of the "Great Books" of western civilization. Presumably we read the "Great Books" in order to familiarize ourselves with the history of great thoughts, and absorb them into our lives. Just so, perhaps we need to read the "Un-Great Books", not so much to absorb them, but to purge them from ourselves... because if they have been socially sanctioned, they have NO DOUBT helped shape social attitudes, and have thus found their way into our souls.

I'm sure this essay seems like yet another unwarranted rationalization of nonsense. It even reminds me of that. It reminds me of how art critics can write thousands of pages trying to understand a Jackson Pollock drip painting, yet have few words to describe the apparently sane and rational works of Michaelangelo. It seems like yet another affirmation of the idea that language, thought, analysis, art, and expression are continually poured into the broken and obscure parts of life. How many poems are written about being happy, or about a day where everything was reasonable? How many songs capture the spirit of a solid 8 hour work day where you were really productive?

If everything has to reduce to reason and logic and personal goals... then just become a scientist I suppose, or some equivalent. I pseudo-support Naked Lunch not in itself, but for what it stands for to me... and maybe this is part of it's social sanction... that it represents a rejection of the conformist insistence on things making sense. It is a form of passive resistance to the aggressive and pervasive power of reason to always demand that we draw conclusions 24 hours a day. It is very post modern... it is very Dada-esque in it's subversion of the sane.

In this respect I can see it representing certain popular attitudes that at least some people have. These being... the desire to subvert... the need to reject the cackling of conventional social attitudes despite their apparent rationality... the need to assert yourself against authority even at the cost of forgoing reasonable gains you might otherwise achieve. One trades off reason for something else in those situations. In so doing I think I see, from my external point of view... the presence of social attitudes toward reason and authority that have their genesis in such apparently inane movements such as Dada or Beat poetry, and which have been delivered into your consciousness by social processes that you had no control over.