Pretty much agree with you here except for the last sentence, where you say 'in other words' and bring in language. The easiest way out of this impasse is to say that language can be used to indicate a general stylistic tendency or some such, as well as formal or natural language etc. - that I'd buy into. But language qua programming language inrelation to a stylistic tendency or language seems problematic.
All of this, including elitism, brings up issues of exclusivity, etiquette, dirtiness, connoisseurship, and odd things such as it was a widespread belief in 19th-century Germany that Jewish men menstruated. Sandor Gilman write about these things and Cuddihy, in an old book, The Ordeal of Civility, talks about etiquette (which would include things like accent) as a way of dividing and imposing the social and social exclusion. So elitism, etc. - the whole constellation - is loaded and related to cultural marxist analyses I think.
- ALan On Thu, 9 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:
A very quick response: I don't personally find Kincaid elite. I'm mostly just arguing for the sake of argument but it still raises a valid question about elitism. Where are the limits? What's the measure? What makes one artist elite and another not? Some art can be like Wittgenstein's language games but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about what a single work of art might signify but rather what methods a movement or body of work might use to communicate ideas. I'm very confused by your comments on Neo-Classicism and Impressionism. You mentioned in an earlier post that you felt that the difference was primarily stylistic. Now you say that the difference has more to do with habitus and culture. I agree but simply applying these terms doesn't really express the extreme changes that took place. You can't ignore the fact that neo-classicism extended well into the 19th century as one of the primary "accepted" art movements, especially in France. So there was cross-over between neo-classicism and impressionism, i.e. they were (to a certain degree) occurring within the same "general" culture although we can say that impressionism represented a rising sub-culture with new ideas about what art should be. The emergence of Impressionism stands as the beginnings of a radical departure from artist-as-craftsman to artist-as-philosophical-intellectual which crystalizes in the words of Manet which were something along the lines of no longer looking at art as works of perfection but rather as works of sincerity. This suggests a radical change in what and how art communicates ideas. In other words, a shift in the "language". Pall On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 3:18 AM, Alan Sondheim<[email protected]> wrote:I think if you find Kincaid elite, you're really pushing the envelope there, as if any art-making were a priori elite, from Grandma Moses to Beuys, whomever. I don't buy into this - I think you art is a language game in W's sense, and that different groups respond differently in all sorts of ways - Bourdieu's Distinction is good in this respect. 'Elite' has uncomfotable connotations of connoisseurship, and that hardly applies to most popular art. The difference between neo-clas and impres to me has more to do with habitus and culture than with any sort of artistic style. I more or less follow Eco in Theory of Semiotics or say Metz' Imaginary Signifier - language tends to run into a _lot_ of problems when extended beyond one sort of formal or informal formalism or another. Sorry, fuzzy thinking tonight, we're leaving tomorrow for a couple of weeks. - alan On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:We're probably applying different terminology to the same things but it's not uncommon to talk about "language" in relation to art work. What I mentioned goes far beyond being just "style", these are different methods of conveying ideas or feelings. Saying that the difference between Neo-Classicism and Impressionism is purely stylistic is a drastic understatement. I think, within the arts, that the idea that elitism always carries negative connotations is more or less obsolete /at least within the elite... :-) /. It's an accepted fact that contemporary art can never speak to "everyone". It's always pushing the boundaries and it takes people a while to catch up. It "speaks" to those who are already in the fray, a part of the art-elite. Artists aren't always the best at communicating what their art is about so often it has to wait for someone to come around who both understands it and is capable of explaining it in a manner that makes sense to people. Kincaid's paintings do transcend the original objects in that they represent the object as well as his own input. It doesn't matter whether or not we think his input is significant. A painting of a jar surpasses the original jar simply because a human inserted a part of themselves into it. It's not longer just the jar, it's the jar and the painter. This is from Kincaid's website: "Thomas Kinkade is America's most collected living artist. Coming from a modest background, Kinkade emphasizes simple pleasures and inspirational messages through his paintings. As a devout Christian, Kinkade uses his gift as a vehicle to communicate and spread inherent life-affirming values." He is "America's most collected living artist." and "uses his gift". He has a "gift" that others don't have. Doesn't this make him elite? He might not be "THE elite" but given these extraordinary credentials (he's also received "multiple National Association of Limited Edition Dealers (NALED) awards for Artist of the Year and Graphic Artist of the Year"!) he must be some kind of elite. Above others. Best in category. Now, the fact that I'm making fun of him for this just makes me another type of "elite". I'm not even sure if I could say "more elite". I mean, I don't have a "Pall Thayer Collector's Society" ( http://www.thomaskinkade.com/magi/servlet/com.asucon.ebiz.collectors.web.tk.CollectorsServlet ). On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 3:12 PM, Alan Sondheim<[email protected]> wrote:On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:We could, for instance say that Impressionism employs a visual language based not on a flowing gradation of color but a more segmented, gradual building of color. I don't know if everyone would agree that this is correct but that's beside the point. The thing is that a lot of people were so happy with the neo-classical "flow" of colors (impeccably blended gradients, etc.) that they couldn't understand why someone would want to break that up into something splotchy and patchy. To the critics it just didn't make sense to attempt a textural representation of something based on a texture that just wasn't there. This was a visual language used by the impressionists. Then we get the same sort of thing with Duchamp where no one understands the conceptual language of his suggestion that an upside down urinal can be a work of art worthy of a spot in a museum simply because the artist has signed it. Kandinsky didn't even expect people to understand his visual language so he wrote "dictionaries" of sorts to explain it.These are styles, not languages, unless one wants to abandon any normal meaning of language.I say that art is always elitist because the act of creating something as art suggests that it the artist's "version" has some transcendental quality to it. Even in the case of Thomas Kincaid. The fact that he creates painting suggests that he, at least, feels that the result of his brushwork somehow transcends the actual objects he's painting. In the broadest sense of the word, that has to count as a type of elitism.So for example Maria Martinez' work is elitist? She didn't even bother signing most of her pieces. Where do you draw the line? I thik you're stretching the meaning of elitism as well; Kincaid's hardly elitist in any usual sense of the term, and I doubt his 'brushwork somehow transcends' anything - the idea of transcendence itself is problematic applied broadly to art. Again I keep thinking - break down the barriers! and for me these terms are barriers to 'just looking' - Andre's Hartford piece for example years ago was called elitist; it's an easy and misplaced weapon. - Alanbest r. Pall On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 9:29 PM, Alan Sondheim<[email protected]> wrote:On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:I believe all art does, at some level, require specific knowledge of specific "languages". If we look for instance at the emergence of Impressionism, it wasn't commonly accepted because people didn't understand its "language".I don't think art has specific languages, but that's a very long argu- ment here; I'd combine Eco with Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language in this sense. I have no idea at all what a 'language of impressionism' is, although I usually can recognize an impressionist painting, but even then there are Americans that I'd have no idea how to place within the aegis.I probably come off sounding really "elitist" but art has always been and will always be "elitist".Now Thomas Kincaid is _not_ elitist and is certainly an artist. So is Brittney for that matter. I do want to make it clear this isn't about your work which I like! But about 'art in general' however that might be! And thanks, Alanbest r. Pall On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:06 AM, Alan Sondheim<[email protected]> wrote:And of course it's valid; I actually don't think 'validity' is a reasonable category in aesthetics - it can be defined in terms of social groups or language games, but has nothing intrinsic about it. Another interesting point - Seedbed could be 'directly' experienced, even without reading the wall-text, but your work requires a knowledge of a specific computer language. So the program can be translated one to another; I don't see Seedbed itself translating, which is why I have fairly negative feelings about 'recreation' art, especially in Second Life... - Alan On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:Well, actually the perl code: #!/usr/bin/perl $p = `Seedbed`; would run without error. $p would contain the "not found" error. But I don't feel that it does much in pointing out the significance of the medium in this particular case. Perhaps if the work was about something lost or nonexistent, it would work but not for the "Seedbed" piece. The title of each of these Microcodes is as much a part of the complete work as anything else. The direct reference by name has already been made in the title and therefore I don't see any meaningful reason to reference it again in this way. Someone might say, "But you did it in 'Sleep'." However, I don't see that as the same thing because 'sleep' is an actual Perl function. If you want to attempt a phenomenological examination of the reference itself, let me explain exactly what led to the creation of this Microcode. I was doing some work the other day where I had to use the "touch" command legitimately. This reminded me of James Morris' "Microcrudities" where he used the command along with the variable "myself". This reminded me of my code piece "exist.pl" from last year where a perl code referenced itself in various human ways, i.e. my_existence, my_experience, my_environment, etc. When I thought of a Perl script referencing itself as the location of the actual file and then 'touching' that file, it reminded me of "Seedbed". And so I created the script that locates 'itself', that is, the file containing the runnable code and then 'touches' the file. I decided to print the long listing of the file each time to show the effects of 'touching' the file (the creation date is updated each time) as a hint that this sort of 'touching' is very different than Acconci's 'touching'. Of course, more people are going to understand the referenced meaning than the real meaning. But does that make it any less valid? Now that I think about it, the work isn't about Acconci's "Seedbed" at all. It's much more about the intended and almost inevitable misunderstanding. best r. Pall On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 11:08 PM, Alan Sondheim<[email protected]> wrote:I agree with you here, and as usual a couple of points. If k:> Seedbed doesn't run, can it be said to run as not-run? This isn't trivial; Max Black discussed it in terms of defining blackbirds as not-this, not-that; obviously the list is infinite. Certainly 'Seedbed' as a command tells us something - that the only thing it will run is the generic not-found - but that's something. I do understand the non-issue of reproduction of other work in micro-code, and as you say, Seedbed is referenced; what I was on about, was what sort of reference? There's a whole phenomenology here of course, which might or might not be of interest. - Alan, and thanks On Sun, 5 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:I think I have to bring things back down to the ground now. After taking a bit of a break in the country in glorious weather, I see that this discussion is really going far beyond the work that's being discussed. Obviously, none of the microcodes that reference other work (and keep in mind that there only 3 or 4 out 20-some codes that do this) are meant to be accurate reproductions of those works. Actually, as reproductions they are meant to fail and in doing so they become new works of art. "Seedbed" attempts to reference the original performance with the words "touch myself" and by using the same title. But the way these words are applied within the code gives them a very different meaning as code. They also produce a result and it's a result that has absolutely nothing to do with the non-code meaning of the works. So these arguments about whether or not the code version references the original "Seedbed" accurately enough, are entirely beside the point. The reason some of the Microcodes reference older work is to highlight the differences between the media. To show that while code as a medium is incapable of reproducing other work created in different media, it is also a distinct medium of its own that is capable of doing things that other media can't. Your suggestion of "an absolute minimum" wouldn't work as a Microcode because, as I mentioned earlier, I set a rule for myself, that all of the codes be runnable. Since, as Alan points out in his post, "Seedbed" doesn't run as a Unix command, this code wouldn't really be runnable. As mentioned above, the idea is simply to bring the original performance to mind. No more. Because the medium being used is incapable of doing more. It's entirely incapable of "bringing it to life, enacting it, redoing it, reperforming it". At the very most, it can "suggest it". best r. Pall On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:16 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:At the risk of stating the obvious, perhaps the problem here is that there is no one essence of this performance, or any performance for that matter. While you do say "a single 'essence'", and not "the", to me a major part of the very idea of performance is to create something which is in excess of language and representation, something which the techne of words or photo or video don't capture, much less a few lines of code. While I think the notion of translating a performance into code is interesting, perhaps what this discussion precisely raises is that there are a multiplicity of essences, dirtiness, fantasy, masturbation, soreness, mystery, discomfort, the body, the absence of the body... Your microcodes seem to be a sort of review or remix of another work, based on your personal interpretation. In fact, I think that the reduction of the body to a set of files in your home directory is in itself an abjection and a sadness, a departure from all the rich, sensual complexity of the body and a reduction to a few digital bytes. Perhaps the sadness of the digital is expressed very well here.Pall Thayer wrote:I guess by "the essence" of the work, I'm considering the absolute minimum that it takes to bring to mind "Seedbed" when looking at the code.Hmm, but here is sounds like you're talking about a simlpe representation, and I think being very reductive! Wouldn't the absolute minimum be something like #!/usr/bin/perl $p = `seedbed`; ? When in fact, the interesting part is to go beyond simply bringing the performance to mind, but as the furtherfield review writes, to bring it to life, to enact it, to redo it, to reperform it, in the form of an actual running program?On 2/7/2009, "Alan Sondheim" <[email protected]> wrote:Hi Paul, The essence it seemed to me wasn't self-referentiality or touch (good unix command too), so much as it was about targeting the ab/use/er, as well as dirtiness. And code's always clean; even dirty code's clean, so there'sOn Thu, 2 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:Hi Alan, One of the primary reasons that I've "redone" a number of known pieces by other artists in these Microcodes is more to point out the difference between code as a medium and other media. So the point isn't necessarily to emulate the work as closely as possible but rather to capture a single "essence" of it in very compact code. I think that trying to work the incline and fantasies into this "version" of the work would result in considerably more code which would in turn make the work overly complex._______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour-- ***************************** Pall Thayer artist http://www.this.is/pallit ***************************** _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour| Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org | [email protected], [email protected], tel US 718-813-3285 ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour-- ***************************** Pall Thayer artist http://www.this.is/pallit ***************************** _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour| Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org | [email protected], [email protected], tel US 718-813-3285 ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour-- ***************************** Pall Thayer artist http://www.this.is/pallit ***************************** _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour| Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org | [email protected], [email protected], tel US 718-813-3285 ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour-- ***************************** Pall Thayer artist http://www.this.is/pallit ***************************** _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour| Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org | [email protected], [email protected], tel US 718-813-3285 ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour-- ***************************** Pall Thayer artist http://www.this.is/pallit ***************************** _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour| Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org | [email protected], [email protected], tel US 718-813-3285 ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour-- ***************************** Pall Thayer artist http://www.this.is/pallit ***************************** _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
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