Author (#35)April 2007 Archives
For our final meeting, workshop member Erik Palmer blended several pitchers of authentic margaritas, the kind he remembers from his Texas childhood. They formed a frosty backdrop to the rigatoni with pesto & sausage and delicious Spring greens salad that we enjoyed together.
A new workshop member was introduced, Mikko King, the seven-year old son of workshop leader Matthew Stadler. Mikko announced that next Wednesday, when this round of the “using global media” workshop is done, he and Matthew will begin a “manga and anime discussion group,” at which kids and grown-ups will share a meal and conversation about these popular Japanese comic forms. Next week the subject is Buddha, the eight-volume manga biography of that great world leader, written and drawn by Osamu Tezuka (of Astro Boy fame). E-mail Matthew at businessofutopia@gmail.com if you are interested in attending.
The evening was dedicated to conclusions and retrospection, as we looked for some perspective on the full scope of global media that we had discussed over the last ten weeks. Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly,” was offered as a kind of lens to refract this vast landscape into a usable set of images that we could carry with us. The poem can be a kind of compass or map, a pragmatic tool for navigating global media in the future.
The poem explores one of “the more irritating minor ideas of Mr. Homburg during his visits home to Concord, at the edge of things.” Stevens was an American poet writing in the first half of the 20th century. He worked as an insurance executive in Hartford, CT., and we speculated that “Mr. Homburg” was probably one aspect of Stevens’s sense of himself, the hat-wearing “suit” wandering the suburban Connecticut landscape, awash in irritating, minor ideas. The poem deserves to be read in its entirety.
Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:
To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,
Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free
From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,
In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,
Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,
What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,
And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,
A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,
Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,
That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field
Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.
A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.
The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,
The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.
Matthew asked if media let us, as Stevens writes, “live beyond ourselves in air.” If so, is this expansive condition a useful or pleasurable part of our being, or is it fraught with alienation and “affectation?” Is our expanded presence, amplified through the disembodied ghosts of mediation, like being in a kind of “glass aswarm with things going as far as they can?” Scott Wayne Indiana likened this glass to the holo-deck, which he looks forward to enjoying, very much, in the near future.
TJ Norris said that he would keep the line, “a transparency through which swallows weave,” with him as a kind of talisman of a desirable condition, a graceful relationship of the self to the mediated self. Sergio Pastor pointed out that Stevens didn’t settle for just the image of the swallows, but actually let their weaving motion enter the poem. In the eight lines that followed their arrival the language — in particular the cutting and shifting of the images into one another (c.f., “…a moving part of a motion, a discovery/ part of a discovery, a change part of a change…”) — drags the reader into the very action the image has described. Reading Stevens, we enter a transparency through which swallows weave. The poem itself is, then, an elegant, penetrating medium indeed.
Leslie Miller reminded us that Stevens, who is her favorite poet, was a romantic, though not an untroubled one. Enchanted by the beauty and poignancy of nature, he nevertheless could never loft its imagery to mind without also reminding us of the indifference of these things to our needs: “a pensive nature, a mechanical/ and slightly detestable operandum, free/ from man’s ghost, larger and yet a little like,/ without his literature and without his gods…”
The class enjoyed Stevens’s ambivalence, there at “the edge of things.” Abi Spring reminded us that the space of that ambivalence had opened in the breach between the body and the beautiful, airy thoughts and images that could depart from the body (expanding and weaving through the transparency of, say, electronic media). The body, anchored to gross matter, remains. We haul its bulk around, trailing an effluence of thoughts and images. Abi directed our attention to the penultimate stanza: “The spirit comes from the body of the world./ Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world/ whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind.”
Abi’s trenchant reminder of our physical place inside bodies was an apt segue into a more general review of the workshop and its set of three broad subjects — interpersonal media (requiring bodies to meet each other in space); material media (in which objects, such as books, can depart from the body and move through the world to find other bodies); and digital media (in which a dematerialized space of electronic information can be accessed by anybody, any where, any time).
The class was rather drunk by this time, and Mikko had fallen asleep in his chair. A meaningful review of the insights we got to over the ten weeks is more easily found by rereading the notes here (in the proceeding nine entries), but a few themes emerged as we sat in the dwindling hours of the evening, enjoying one another’s company inordinately. Most memorably, we returned to the issue of deceit and theatricality. Can media, Scott and others asked, let us share our authentic selves with others? Or do they displace our authentic selves with false, partial, or misleading images?
Remembering the slight distance Wallace Stevens placed between himself (the authoring self) and Mr. Homburg (“the suit”), Luisa argued that media (especially interpersonal media) invite us to don suits of one or another sort, and then enact a partial self, but that this mediated self is nevertheless “genuine.” The enactment of a role (either socially or via material or digital media) is theatrical, yes, but it is also “genuine.”
Her observation led to general calls for “authenticity” in our inhabitation of media, but that was countered by a final plea from Matthew that we forsake the issue of authenticity finally and completely. Our obligation is not to transmit some interior, private sense of self but to inhabit roles and relationships that are defined by the media we engage. We should endeavor to understand these roles and relationships and then inhabit them fully, robustly, with all our heart and mind. Today I am a corporation. Tomorrow, a seminar leader. The next day, a writer from Portland. We enjoy the capacity to enact all these things, no one of them any less authentic than another.
The next using global media workshop takes place in Berlin, Germany, on May 24, 25, and 26. If you or someone you know is interested in attending (or would like the workshop to be offered somewhere else, at another time) please contact Matthew Stadler at usingglobalmedia@gmail.com
A superb evening! Scott Wayne Indiana's pot roast and home-made bread were fantastic. A great salad from Leslie Miller, and our special guests, Mike Merrill, Jona Bechtolt, and Claire Evans, from Urban Honking, brought a smoky scotch that was exquisite.
The question of resistance was raised. We observed that the evolution of most art forms is determined by the resistance the medium poses to the will of the maker. The writer discovers writing by dealing with the intransigence of language. The musician learns the capacities of her instrument.
We asked our guests, all avid producers of digital culture, whether digital media offer them any resistance. Mike Merrill said, paradoxically, that the resistance digital media presents is the enticement to get drawn in deeper, to be sucked, as with quicksand, into the ever increasing pull of all the possible links and connections and elaborations that unfold as one encounters digital media. Ironically, the challenge digital media present is not to overcome the medium;'s intransigence (as with language and paint and metal and stone) but to demur from its seductive beckoning. The digital artist must engineer an unlikely circumspection, offering only a narrow and limited territory—a set of dead-ends that do not endlessly unfold.
And so, taking that lesson to heart, I will say no more about our superb evening. I leave it to you, Abi Spring, Leslie Miller, Sergio Pastor, Scott Wayne Indiana, Luisa Guyer, Erik Palmer, and Stephanie Snyder, to say what ever more you wish to say about our time together on your own blogs and websites. Do not bother to comment here, lest you rupture our hard-won closure. In two weeks we meet again, for our last class together.
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.