Second Workshop #8
April 5, 2007

We reconvened after our Spring Break to a cornucopia of delicious snacks. Melia Donovan, Luisa Guyer, Stephanie Snyder, Erik Palmer, and a returning TJ Norris led a full-on provision of finger foods that included several fresh breads, avocado dip, chips, salsa, hummous, matzohs, crudite, and of course our traditional anchovies and Danish butter. Drinks were primarily wine and champagne (with a few beers for Erik Palmer and our special guest for the evening, Matt McCormick).

We picked up where we had left off, with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s essay, “The Culture Industry.” We observed that the essay was written in exile and wondered if this might account for some of its themes of loss. TJ Norris got our discussion started by “randomly” picking a passage about the “perpetual promises” left unfulfilled by the culture industry. “The diner must be satisfied with the menu,” this passage concluded. We considered the ways that mass culture offers a limited menu of often pre-digested choices, thus depriving the consumer of the actual work and pleasure of consumption. Stephanie Snyder was put in mind of the Fluxus artists, in particular Daniel Spoerri. Stephanie described a Spoerri piece in which he prepared and ate a meal with a friend, preserved the uncleared table with all of its scraps and stains, and then declared this residue an art piece, which the gallery would have to deal with. We considered some other themes of promise and withholding that run through mass culture, including Adorno and Horkheimer’s example of “erotic films” that “center on copulation…precisely because it must never take place.”

Kant came up (triggered by Adorno and Horkheimer’s citation of Kant’s “secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason.”) I offered a simplification in which I said Kant’s refiguring of subjective taste as the product of an objective process made me feel less lonely. It gave me a way to feel the collectivity that shapes my deepest feelings and yet not have to believe in God. Stephanie Snyder clarified and expanded on this view of Kant (she might have also corrected it, but I’ve forgotten the details), and we looked at the analogy Adorno and Horkheimer make between Kant’s mechanism and the operations of the culture industry: “But today,” they continue, “that secret has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalize it.” Sergio Pastor pointed out that this “power of society” was, for Adorno and Horkheimer, the power of the industrial base, “the most powerful sectors of industry — steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals.”

While the culture industry might appear to be a top-down imposition of limits on cultural possibilities, it in fact operates through a collective groundswell of limitations and erasures. The mass is both perpetrator and victim of its own poor taste. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading, stricter authoritarian control over cultural production paradoxically offers an antidote to the maladies of the culture industry. They look nostalgically at pre-Fascist Germany, where “the failure of democratic control to permeate life had led to a paradoxical situation. Many things were exempt from the market mechanism which had invaded the western countries. The German educational system, universities, theaters with artistic standards, great orchestras, and museums enjoyed protection. The political powers, state and municipalities, which had inherited such institutions from absolutism, had left them with a measure of the freedom from the forces of power which dominates the market, just as princes and feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. This strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand.”

We wondered whether our own experience echoed theirs. Have we benefited from the undemocratic protection of certain realms of art production, free from “the verdict of supply and demand?” Or, is the market, with all of its populist flexibility and impulsive slathering of support on the delight of the moment a more reliable irrigator of the work that we value?

Our guest, the film-maker Matt McCormick, arrived, worried by the sight of a dander-rich cat on the porch couch. Matt is terribly allergic and for a moment we considered moving the class out-of-doors where the dander was less thick in the air. But Matt said he’d tough it out and we stayed inside. Matt recalled his hope, as a child, to be good at sports, and then the depressing discovery that he wasn’t good. He’d always assumed he’d be a jock and go to college to get a business degree, but things didn’t turn out that way. Matt fell in with the drama crowd and wasn’t accepted at the school he hoped to attend. He ended up making some movies with a friend who got in to the University of Santa Fe, which Matt described as “basically an art school.” When Matt went to visit, he loved it and applied and was accepted. From that point on, Matt was thoroughly involved in making movies and making music. As the mid-90s rolled along, Matt enjoyed the creative explosion in pop music, where Nirvana opened the doors to hugely weird, innovative sounds that began to find a place in the market. At shows or on the radio or on MTV, one could witness the strangest new music, all of it flourishing within the most “mass” of markets and yet coming from essentially DIY origins.

Matt especially admired K Records, the Olympia, Wash.-based label run by Calvin Johnson. He recalled wishing there was a film-distribution company as cool as K that would get his films, and the others he admired, to an audience. By the time he arrived in Portland, Matt found a bunch of really interesting film-makers and decided to launch a cable-access show screening the stuff he liked. But the equipment was too crude. When someone at the Thee O (formerly X-Ray Café) asked is he’d put on a film-screening, he agreed and started a series he called Peripheral Produce. Peripheral Produce happened once a month or every two months. A bunch of short films would be shown, and then someone, usually a film-maker or someone associated with film, would do some strange performance thing, often film-related. One film-maker (didn’t catch his name) used to set two or three projectors running with loops of his hand-painted films and then dance and scream on stage in the intersection of the projections. Miranda July did a half-dozen or more acts. Film-makers, such as Vanessa Renwick, were motivated by the showcase to begin producing short films for every edition, cranking them out at a much faster rate than usual.

Matt knew the material was excellent, so he put together a sampler VHS and distributed it. That’s how Peripheral Produce became a film label. He and a friend made VHS copies on the sly at his friends’ job, ten copies at a time. They made only 100 or so copies the first time. Matt took these with him on the road, including a show in Olympia, where Calvin Johnson came and saw the movies and asked if K Records could distribute some copies of the tape. Matt was psyched. Matt told us the samplers were just documents, a thing they made to give to friends or other people they hoped would watch. He never expected to make back the $400 or so he spent on each one, and mostly the films went into the hands of friends, or friendly stores (like Reading Frenzy or Quimby’s, in Chicago), and a few got sold.

Peripheral Produce operated this way, more or less, with the network expanding only as Matt’s expanding web of relationships demanded, right up until he made a Peripheral Produce “greatest hits” DVD collection. DVDs cost more, and most of the cost is in the set-up, so you’d be foolish to make only a hundred copies. Suddenly, Peripheral Produce was making 1000 DVDs for a couple thousand dollars and it became more important to think of ways to really get them out and sell them. One way was touring, such as when Miranda July would tour her performances and audiences that knew her would discover the Peripheral Produce compilations with her work. Matt likened this approach to the “split 7-inch,” where a band expands its audience by splitting a single with another band. Matt also told us he doesn’t think touring always works. If audiences don’t like the work, touring sucks; it becomes depressing and ineffective. Some workshop members pointed out that, painful or not, physically encountering an audience (however small) is valuable and builds something entirely different than the relationships created when an object moves through the world. Disastrous or not, the tour makes a network of relationships that cannot happen if we never leave home.

Now that Peripheral Produce had units to move, the good press garnered by many of its featured film makers, plus great word-of-mouth, became a crucial part of a sustainable economy that could sell a couple thousand copies of some of its more popular titles (a significant feat in the world of experimental film). Matt reminded us that, nevertheless, the blog of “some 19-year old in Cleveland” meant far more to him than “a great review in Artforum.” Reaching the untrained audience that has no reason to like what you’ve done (and, Matt said, “is probably even looking for any reason to think that what you’ve done sucks”) is thrilling and uplifting in a way that applause from critics is not. “Critics are easily duped,” Matt said. They’re even “self-duping.” It was exciting to hear this complete reversal of the earlier observations of Adorno and Horkheimer: now it was not the untrained mass that was fooled; it was the trained critic. The training itself had made them foolish.

At our bidding, Matt discussed the very different dynamics of producing work for circulation in the gallery economy. His recent installation at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery was made in an edition of ten, specifically for the gallery environment. Copies sold for $8000. (Or did Matt say $10,000?) This is a far cry from the sale of a couple thousand copies of “The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal” at $15.95 each. Given the choice between making $8000 by selling thousands of copies to a “mass” audience or by selling two or three copies to collectors, Matt said he’d prefer the mass audience. But that’s a lot of work and the money is never guaranteed, especially for the more innovative work. A gallery gives him the chance to take greater risks, plus a significant apparatus for getting it done. There is a staff of talented people taking care of things Matt used to handle (the pricing, marketing, setting up the physical room, etc.) Now Matt’s allowed to concentrate on the art. Similarly, he’s happy with his other new opportunities, such as the sizable budget provided for the Shins video that will premiere on MTV this Saturday. “It’s like some kind of dream,” he told us. “Imagine a bunch of guys who’ve been friends since they were teenagers, being given all this money just to make a little film, and then it airs to millions of people.” Again, the reversal of Adorno and Horkheimer was refreshing. Matt sought and enjoyed the embrace of the mass audience and reveled in the opportunities the culture industry affords. He pointed out how Miranda July’s work has also been enabled and expanded by her engagement of Hollywood, with all of its systems and powers.

We adjourned before ten. Next week we will look closely at the ways digital media — and especially the dynamics of peer-to-peer production — might circumvent (or not) some of the worst potentials of the culture industry. Some, such as Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), see a liberating potential in this proliferation of new producers (thereby, the monolithic grip of the culture industry is loosened). Rheingold says “the big battle ahead concerns media cartels and government agencies that are seeking to re-impose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume.” But I wonder if the power to create is actually distinct, these days, from the power to consume? Is creating culture now really any different from consuming it? If not, the “power” to create might be a kind of palliative to mask our eternal work as consumers. Or maybe the dichotomy is wrong. Is the difference between production and consumption any longer a relevant distinction?

Our guest next week will be Mikey Merrill, co-founder of Portland’s cultural website, Urban Honking.

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