November 2006 Archives
Our eighth meeting began with Philip finally caving in to provide an elegant boxed invitation that I had wanted him to show as an example of a potent, intentional, communicative object. It was very nice, and thank you Philip. We took up the question of the Culture Industry in a time of multi-source user-produced culture. I repeated my pessimism about this new condition and claimed that we are now the producers of our own isolation — workers in the culture “cottage industry.” The group was invited to offer some reasons for optimism, counter examples to this pessimistic assessment.
Marcus pointed out that digital production has put him in touch with large groups of like-minded users — for example, 100 or so others who share his obsession with a very specific era of psychedelic album covers — and thus remedied an isolation he, and every other obscure hobbyist, would have felt throughout the pre-Internet era. Playing Devil’s advocate, I said this was a very narrow group, essentially a projection of Marcus’s own subjectivity. To immediately find everyone who shares your most peculiar, narrow desires is not a remedy to isolation; it is a machine for turning the otherwise heterogeneous world into a mirror of your own subjectivity. Chris countered that he found a similarly large and engaging community on Dennis Cooper’s blog and that, contrary to my assessment, they were a heterogeneous and surprising lot. Dennis’s attentiveness and modesty in the forum — his ability to be a good online host to many divergent guests — was credited with enabling this mix. Rob pointed out that these shared activities of production give us pleasure and stimulate the creative engines of our brains.
Others were going to chime in, but (perhaps fearing the onset of an incurable optimism) I shut down the conversation by noting that the role of a medium in any artistic work is, at least in part, to resist the will of the artist. The medium translates our subjective desires into objective art by contravening us, by frustrating our desires. The example of marble or steel is an obvious one, where the artist must deal with the capacities of the medium in order to go from intentions to completion of the work. Equally, language resists us. In this light, the ideal of the virtual world — to make an intervening medium that answers completely and immediately to the desires of the user — would be the death of art. I acknowledged that no medium achieves this ideal, and perhaps my impression of the virtual world being such an arena of unfettered desire might come from my ignorance of the difficulties of really working in that medium.
Then our guest for the evening, Gus Van Sant, arrived with his friend Bobby, a screenwriter from Los Angeles visiting to see if he wants to move to Portland. Gus was so interesting and so generous with his time that we took advantage of it and talked with him for the next two-and-a-half hours. There was much to talk about and we only scratched the surface, but the scratching began with Gus’s early recognition that as a painter (studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design) his prospects for employment were bleak. Like many of his classmates, including ¾ of the Talking Heads, he decided to do his work, essentially the same work, in a different medium. At first (partly under the influence of a then thriving film arts scene, typified by the work of Stan Brakhage), he literally painted with film. He painted on the film; he projected light through film to make painterly surfaces; and he created “abstract visual” work with film.
Then he moved to LA in, I believe, 1976. (This truncated bio is partly Gus’s summary and partly my own poor listening skills. I’m sure there are some online sources for this same story…) He wanted to work in Hollywood and understand that way of making movies so he took a job with Ken Shapiro, the maverick creator of The Groove Tube, a mainstream/counter-culture movie whose success earned Shapiro studio support for a follow-up hit. Gus would be his assistant. “I rolled the joints,” he told us, explaining his place in the stoned circle of very talented comedy writers that Shapiro had gathered around his new project. Shapiro worked inside the studio system, but he did so from a seeming “outsider” position, pursuing quixotic artistic goals. In that way, Gus’s time with him was a savvy choice, exposing him to the dynamics of some Hollywood business relationships that he would also (later) push to unusual ends.
That summer he and his friend Eric got jobs on a film crew in Portland, for Penny Allen’s film Property. The crew was paid by CETA, a now-defunct public subsidy for employment training that Gus described as “welfare for people who don’t qualify for welfare.” Allen’s crew and project were very “community based,” casting local characters such as Walt Curtis to, essentially, play themselves in a drama about gentrification and exclusion from the housing market. This low-budget feature film-making experience was also a seminal one for Gus, and it is possible to see his later choices about film-making as combining the lessons of Shapiro/Hollywood and Allen/Portland. In the rich intersection of these two approaches, he has made an idiosyncratic and deeply subjective body of films that nevertheless has reached a vast, divergent audience around the globe.
In discussing the way those films got made we touched briefly on his early short, The Discipline of DE, which came about when he contacted William Burroughs by cold-calling him and then visiting to talk and ask for film rights. Gus got the rights for free because, as Burroughs told him, “there’s no money in short films.” He made the 9 minute movie on 16 mm, doing nearly everything himself. Gus’s second feature (and his first to be released), Mala Noche, was made in the mid-80s through similar means, but with a crew. (Gus says that getting film rights from the story’s author, Walt Curtis, was much harder than getting film rights from Burroughs.) As with the short, Gus cobbled together funding from friends, family, and savings. He made the film in Portland with a crew that borrowed heavily from the Penny Allen shoot.
Mala Noche was meant to reach audiences through film festivals and, via that exposure, through distributors who would place it in “art house” cinemas (a typical feature of most big cities and college towns back then, where two or three different movies would play each day, usually foreign films and independently made features; Cinema 21 is the evolved version of this once-common part of the distribution landscape). It did so, most notably through inclusion in a Los Angeles-based gay and lesbian film festival that Gus tried hard to get out of. He had heard they were unreliable and would “lose prints;” but his efforts failed and the film showed, winning a key award and the support of critics and distributors who helped make it a success. It did well enough that Gus was able to get backing for his next feature, Drugstore Cowboy.
The financial success of Drugstore Cowboy set Gus up to be able to get funding for his idiosyncratic films, so long as he played the studio game of securing the right “bigger name” actors. Funding came, he said, because he could get the right actors to sign on and the studios could then bank on the actors. Gus described the roller coaster ride of the next decade or so — where his reputation (and power) within Hollywood soared and plummeted as each film (all of them idiosyncratically his) succeeded or failed — as a process of sticking with his ideas, even if it meant waiting out a drought of studio doubts until he next proved his worth again. Thus he was able to make his bizarre re-shoot of Psycho by bringing it up again and again, until he got the go-ahead right after Good Will Hunting had its great success.
Throughout this time, he has continued making small films and videos, sometimes commercially (music videos and ads) and also non-commercially (increasingly, now, using the movie function on his small digital camera). He’s also continued making movies in Portland (though not exclusively), enacting his own version of the approach he encountered with Penny Allen, using non-actors and a crew that’s at least partly based here.
Some interesting things that came out, in regard to our workshop’s subject, were Gus’s belief that movies will be an obsolete form soon — not just film (though that’s heading out soon) but the convention of making feature-length story movies that one sits and watches. Gus sees the vitality of online gaming, its aesthetics, and the sociability of gaming environments, as potent models for future visual entertainments. He recalled playing Doom and being astonished when, moments into the game, he was “blown away by some 14-year old girl in Minnesota.”
He believes that most people who succeed and become visible within the movie-making economy are savvy about the logic of that economy and work hard to manipulate it to their advantage. Certainly this is true of himself, though he didn’t say so; from the very first he has made canny choices and shown great insight into the question of sustaining a career. Considering the range of films he’s made and the reach those films have had, I would even say he is a genius at using that system.
He reminded us that its important to stick to one’s own impulses and not let ourselves become divided or confused by guessing what a hypothetical audience (or anyone else) might want. The work can only succeed if it is clearly yours. The audience has to come to it, not the other way around; and they can only see it and come to it, if it’s clear about its interests. I added that these interests, the real center of anyone’s work — unsullied by attempts to please others — are inevitably very embarrassing to the artist. Since some wag said that was just my problem, I realize that I expressed my point poorly — I meant that the real core focus of one’s own work is always indefensible. When we find what our desire or obsession or curiosity is, that focus will never be explainable to others; we are unable to defend its importance against any accusation it is trivial or wrong. (That’s the discomfort, the embarrassment.) Contrarily, whenever we find a focus for our work that we feel we can defend or argue for, we’re probably straying away from our real interests. Real interests are indefensible. Try to work in a way that you can’t defend or argue for.
I invite the rest of you to add any of the many other insights Gus offered us, here, as comments/addenda to my incomplete account.
Next week we meet on Thursday December 7. Our guest will be Mikey Merrill of Urban Honking. Please bring a laptop if you have one, preferably with wireless capability. And start thinking about the features of a class website that you’d like to take advantage of during the eternity that lies ahead in which our primary contact and aid to one another will be via the website. What do we need for our work for the future?
We began the evening listening to Frank O’Hara, the celebrated poet of mid-century New York, gossipy genius, conduit between writers and artists — was his body a public space? — and author of long, beautiful, capacious poems. We heard him recite two short ones at a 1964 SUNY Buffalo reading (“Naptha” and “Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed]”); then we read “Why I am Not a Painter” from the page.
My hunch is that the relationship between painting (Mike Goldberg’s) and writing (O’Hara’s) that O’Hara articulates in this didactic poem exemplifies a way any one of us might gracefully, productively position our own work within the context of what Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer call the “culture industry.” I asked that we at least try to connect the poem to that essay in our discussion and, while Philip made a gallant effort to do so, the jury is still out on the connections between the poem and the essay.
No one brought the objects to “show and tell” but we had a very good discussion about the ways that objects mediate our relations to others. Initially I was disappointed. I had imagined that — at least as relief from the avalanche of books and text objects that have been flooding our room with language — we would enjoy some convivial, close silence as we passed the objects, glowing with their auras of meaning, amongst us and appreciated their power to mediate and connect without language or reading. I accused the class of failing. But Beth pointed out, and then Colin elaborated on, the fact that we all came in clothes and these were textless objects that communicated whole volumes, accomplishing exactly what I had hoped. Further, it was pointed out that textless objects are also read, that the codes of visual communication are language-like. There may not be so big a gap between the well-made books we’ve been considering and the successful textless object that mediates our relations as it moves among us. Colin attempted to “read” Philip’s glasses, for example.
The power of objects to organize a group’s ideas and feelings with great quickness and visceral pull became our segue into conversation with our special guest, Laurie King, one of the prime movers at Jobs With Justice in Portland. Laurie talked about a three-story tall inflatable rat that Jobs With Justice sometimes uses at rallies. The rat is shared amongst various activist groups and stands for whomever is the target of protest. Laurie has also used large puppets (a la Bread and Puppet), banners, and costumes to create a sense of play and what she called “a plot” at Jobs With Justice actions.
Laurie said public protests need to have a plot, and she described one middle-of-the-night gathering at which ten carloads of Jobs With Justice sympathizers orchestrated a Keystone Cops-like obstruction of the employee parking lot at a business that was hiring replacement workers during a struggle with their regular employees. By blocking access to the protected lot, they forced the replacement workers to park near another group of protesters who were then able to talk with them and educate them about the lies and tactics of management. Laurie emphasized the importance of playfulness and a sense of pleasure and play in these interactions. She (and Dave King, Laurie’s husband, who also organizes and takes part in these actions) said they were able to get replacement workers to quit the job by opening their eyes to the bigger picture, and that this was only possible because they treated them as allies and not enemies.
Laurie told us that organizing large groups requires lots of face-to-face meetings and personal contact. She feels that e-mail does not motivate crowds; phone calls are better, but nothing can replace a face-to-face appeal. Her greatest resource is a data base of contacts and years and years of sustaining those relationships by working together in person.
We considered the difference between labor organizing and the network of Latino organizers at work on immigration issues. In particular, Latino organizers use the church and radio effectively to get all ages and families to protests. We wondered whether there’s any radio we’d listen to, and Dave proposed KBOO.
Regarding the police, Laurie said she works with them when the context demands and without them when that’s appropriate. For example, immigration rallies often bring undocumented workers out, so you want the police engaged as allies; otherwise you risk arrest and, for the undocumented, expulsion. On this note, we also remembered that police arrive at many of actions very open and available for person-to-person relations, but then the order comes: the mask goes down, the face disappears, and the police become a faceless battalion. This is a painful, dehumanizing moment for the police as well as for their targets. In the context of our class, it reminded us once again of the importance of symmetrical relations: as a person you can productively interact with the police as people; but if the police become a battalion, you need to also become a battalion if you want to relate productively to them.
We closed the evening with Theodore Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s essay, “The Culture Industry” (which is a chapter of their 1944 book The Dialectics of Enlightenment). Colin contextualized it with some background about their work in the 1930s in Frankfurt, then their exile to New York as the Nazis came to power, and the larger purposes of their work — which was the hope, on the part of what became known as “the Frankfurt School,” to rescue centuries of European humanist thought from the horrific ruptures of two murderous World Wars.
Colin said the essay describes a condition that is also known as “late capitalism,” wherein revolutionary consciousness is made impossible because the idea of revolution has been usurped and neutralized as just another consumer choice, safely within the system of capitalism. He also pointed our attention to a series of dichotomies Adorno and Horkheimer used in their essay, among them “amusement” and whatever is not amusement; “purveyors” of culture and “the proletariat,” or what they also call “the mass;” and “business” which emerges as an operating principle eclipsing its opposite, “expression.”
The class wondered what could comprise a desirable, productive position for working within the monolithically bleak, totalitarian circumstances Adorno and Horkheimer described. We dug around in their essay for details of an Eden — a lost, golden past from which we seemed to have been permanently expelled — that included such things as “art,” “truth,” “true language,” “serious music,” “gusto,” and “style” (to list some of the words they gave to what the Culture Industry destroyed). We all felt the bleakness and totality of their essay was impressive but, ultimately, disabling.
Marcus drew our attention to aspects of the culture industry that might now be undermined by peer-to-peer, user-made cultural work. Adorno and Horkheimer describe “few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points,” a circumstance that is changed today. Marcus passed out statistics showing 26.6 million blogs on a growth curve turning exponentially upward. Philip, playing devil’s advocate, wondered aloud if anyone reads these blogs.
Colin reminded us that the prison Adorno and Horkheimer describe is constituted by a culture industry that invites us into repetitive, isolating relations within which we can never conceive of ourselves as subjects in social solidarity with other subjects; we glue our faces to the tube(s) and go to sleep happy. If indeed the path out of this prison is to create relations that connect us as subjects (that is, as individual people) in solidarity with other subjects, the radical democratization of production — no longer three channels; now 26.6 million blogs — might not mean much. Today we isolate ourselves within our own production, just as muffled and removed from the subjectivity of others, just as unable to shape social solidarity. In essence, the industrial efforts of the culture industry have been replaced by a pervasive cottage industry in which we produce our own prisons.
Eliding many important parts of the evening’s discussion, we closed on an optimistic note about the importance of reading and listening. The radical act now is to listen, to pay attention. Plenty is being said, but when it arrives in the ears and minds of peers — of other subjects — it becomes the site of something quite explosive, a node of social solidarity. If Adorno and Horkheimer are right that “the might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds,” maybe it is possible for us to recover that space as a site of play and inter-subjectivity.
Finally, will we work together on a gathering of people? Please use the comments section of this blog entry to make your proposals. Or e-mail all of us.
Please read the excerpt from Raymond Williams’s winningly small and pragmatic book, Communication, to see what another kind of Marxist does in the face of the same conditions that compelled Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s essay. Beth will provide an introduction to the book for us, and the rest of you should be ready to point us toward an especially wonderful line or passage either in the Adorno/Horkheimer text or in Williams’s. I will — yes really and actually — go around the table and ask each one of you to read us your selection. Next class is Monday November 27. See you there.
Hello friends,
Workshop #6 transpired on a blustery evening of pouring rain. Congratulations to the hardy half who made it to class, and thanks to the absent ones who sent in their regrets. The next time that we number fewer than 8, we will conduct class in the cozy chairs by the fireplace...so don't miss it!
We began our discussion considering the life of Gertrude Stein. As background, I described her upbringing in boom-era San Francisco (1874 - 1899) among middle class Jews, orphaned as a young teenager, and her lively, intense friendship with older brother Leo. The two moved together to Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, initiating an artistic and literary milieu that has been exhaustively described and documented. Anyone interested should read Stein's own The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I also recommend Sylvia Salinger's book of letters, Just a Pretty Girl from the Country. This collection of letters home from a 20-something-year old black sheep of wealthy San Francisco Jews (who had been sent to stay with the Steins in Paris to keep her from associating with an undesirable suitor back home — "the coffeeboy") is a hilarious corrective to the grandiose mythologizing usually imposed on this interesting set of lives in belle epoque Paris. Salinger lived with Michael and Sarah Stein (older brother and sister-in-law of Gertrude and Leo) in the years just before WW I. Her letters confess bewilderment in the company of Matisse and Picasso and chronicle a life of obsessive shopping and gossip.
Stein's biography set the stage for our consideration of her approach to publishing. We recognized in her an almost contemporary figure, clear about her work and yet stymied in her efforts to find support and an audience. Her use of self-publishing, subsidized publishing, agents, and established publishers gave us a full palette of some of the same options (and challenges) we face today. Especially notable was her yearning for the support and validation of an established publisher and her grave disappointment when she finally got it. With Harcourt's wildly successful publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein herself became a valuable commodity who would be defined (and limited) by Harcourt's sense of what of her was saleable to "the public." Stein's hope that success would bring wide publication of her "real" work was dashed on the commercial judgment of Harcourt. He would only publish her "more open" books, like The Autobiography, and her "confessions and lectures."
The stewards of Stein's "real" books turned out to be those very small communities of like-minded writers and artists who both published and read her work, then kept it alive through their own work and teaching. It was noted how small these networks were — and are — and that they are built through person-to-person relationships attended to over time. In our own time, we considered the career of Lisa Robertson (a Canadian poet and essayist) as an example of smart engagement with a similar system. Robertson's insistence on working with people who interest her and her general indifference to working with those who don't was suggested as a good strategy for building a lasting career. This also implies an indifference to the hierarchy of forms (that is, an indifference to such hierarchical practices as scrambling to get a bigger publisher, focusing on "a book" at the expense of other writing, slighting zines or blogs, or changing the writing itself to suit the needs of a market) and the primacy of maintaining long lasting peer relationships.
With Robertson's career as our model, we asked what are good manners and etiquette for initiating such relationships. In approaching editors or agents, it was suggested that we be straightforward and confident. Situate ourselves as peers, not as supplicants. Presume the editor or agent feels the same. Where there is no common interest do not pretend there is. Respond to interest and support in kind. Mutuality and symmetricality, again, are our ideals. All experience suggests that editors, agents, and writers are in fact the very same people — a group involved in both writing and reading, all of them at once producers and consumers of literature. (Every editor of my books has also been a published writer.)
This curious fact — that there is, effectively, no permanent audience separate from the producers of culture, no group who just consumes — became the node for an interesting insight. Perhaps the emerging logic in this time of mixed proprietary and "open source" cultural work is a consumerless society: All are involved in the mutual production of culture, functioning as audience or consumer only as one mode in our collaborative work of production. This is certainly true of shared forms such as role-playing games, machinima, or remix culture, and increasingly true of literary production, visual art, and music, where the audience for work is also the producer of work (one band finishes its set and swaps places with the audience, who is the other band). In such a condition of radical mutuality the importance of creating and maintaining truly symmetrical peer relationships of respect and exchange is very clear.
With that thought we looked at two beautiful objects brought in by Chris Stamm and Sarah Boss: a kiddush cup and a plastic bottle of holy water. It was noted that both objects charmed their possessors by being unconsumable: they generated meaning and value in dialogue with the possessor, whose adoration and imagination are necessary ingredients in the mix of the object's aura. We spoke briefly about such non-book objects, but little came of our discussion.
The evening closed with a brief consideration of Mizuko Ito's study of amateur cultural production networks on the Annenberg Centers DIY studies weblog, Here were robust examples of the peer-to-peer swarm of cultural producers that are increasingly common, especially for kids growing up with digital technologies. The weblog itself was also admired and I announced that, driven by such admiration, the using global media workshop would initiate its weblog at Urban Honking so that we too can take advantage of this startling new technology. You can see its prototype version at www.urbanhonking.com/usingglobalmedia
Next week, Chris Stamm and Marcus Estes will introduce us to a chapter of Theodore Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." This, by now, canonical text is a well written, stirring critique of mid-20th century mass culture. Two questions for us: Is such a critique relevant today? Have the networks of amateur cultural production brought the beast to its knees? Also, be ready to propose and/or discuss possible public gatherings/events we might undertake, and be ready to discuss the workshop's weblog, its ideal capacities and uses.
Thank you.
Matthew