Pretentiousness Tag Archives

I started making new collages several weeks ago. Now that my quarter of teaching at RIT is over, I finally have the spare time and energy to do so. It feels good. Images will be coming soon.

And, in many ways, I’m returning to image making with fresh eyes. Sure, the main focus of my work has not changed much since my thesis work several years ago, but I have learned much about art and also myself in even just the past few months.

Trust has always been a struggle. Granted, it’s never taken me long to complete a collage. Sometimes a few hours, sometimes over a week. There is no special technique or skill required to create them. But for even such small, simple works the process is daunting because all collage is, at its core, about destruction—the wholesale slaughter of images.

Here I have a magazine image. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. That’s why I harvested it from my pile of magazines in the first place. Do I use this? Do I slice it up? What if I make the wrong cuts? Do I paste it down? What if it’s in the wrong place? Do I color over it? Anything I do to it could ruin it forever, this small piece of perfection. It’s too good to use. It’s too good not to use.

Here I have a collage. It has some interesting things happening, small places of perfection amongst the whole. I fall in love with these elements. How could I cover them up or change them in any way? But the collage itself isn’t finished. It’s boring. I can’t leave it there.

But in order to continue I must destroy what I’ve already done. I have to hack away and bury the things I love with the hope that something new and better will come of it by the end. The prospect is frightening.

Collage is inherently about loss. I feel sadness and doubt with every action as I am always finding something new to love, a little zone of comfort and happiness within the image and then am forced to ruin it forever with only the vaguest of notions that something better is out there.

Art is a lot like life.

“Feet First” (“Zuerst die Füße”) is a 1990 work by artist Martin Kippenberger, which has been making the news because of how much it’s pissed off the Catholics:

“Surely this is not a work of art but a blashphemy and a disgusting piece of trash that upsets many people,” [Franz] Pahl told Reuters by telephone. “This decision to keep the statue there is is totally unacceptable. It is a grave offence to our Catholic population.”

Art experts defended the work.

“Art must always be free and the artist should not have any restrictions on freedom of expression,” Claudio Strinati, a superindendent for Rome’s state museums, told an Italian newspaper on Thursday.

(Quote Source)

While I can’t say I think it’s the most perfectly executed work of art, it certainly isn’t a “disgusting piece of trash.” If it offends you that much then you don’t have to look at it. It’s that simple.

The past few days I’ve been rummaging through the tremendous pile of photocopies and printouts I’ve accumulated throughout my grad school career. (It really is large—five and a quarter inches, conservatively. I totally just measured it.) My goal here is to re-read some things to refresh my memory so I won’t look like a dumbass were I to incorrectly referrence things.

I haven’t read many of these things in years and so I’m in horrible shape and completely out of practice. Why would I need practice reading, you ask? Because postmodern theory isn’t exactly like reading Peanuts. Get this:

Very briefly, Lacan describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a meaning. I must omit the familial or more orthodox psychoanalytic background to this situation, which Lacan transcodes into language by describing the Oedipal rivalry in terms not so much of the biological individual who is your rival for the mother’s attention but rather of what he calls the Name-of-the-Father, paternal authority now considered as a linguistic function. His conception of the signifying chain essentially presupposes one of the basic principles (and one of the great discoveries) of Sausserean structuralism, namely, the proposition that meaning is not a one-to-one relationship, between signifier and signified, between the materiality of language, between a word or a name, and its referent or concept. Meaning on the new view is generated by the movement from signifier to signifier. What we generally call the signified—the meaning or conceptual content of an utterance—is now rather to be seen as a meaning-effect, as that objective mirage of signification generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers among themselves. When that relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of linguistic malfunction and the psyche of the schizophrenic may then be grasped by way of a twofold proposition: first, that personal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present; and, second, that such active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still of the sentence, as it moves along its hermeneutic circle through time. If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life. With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.

That’s an excerpt from Frederic Jameson‘s book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

Please note that he’s not using the term “schizophrenic” in the psychiatric sense. And, believe it or not, he’s actually saying things in there.

(This is part 2 of my rebuttal to Peter Bagge’s comic “Real” Art.” You can read part 1 here.)

I find the concept of “shock art” asinine and ridiculous. The art itself is fine—it’s the label “shock art” I have a problem with. And that’s all it is—it’s not a style or methodology, it’s a label. When people encounter a work of art that, superficially, violates their sense of morals or decency, whether from religious beliefs or elsewhere, that’s where they stop—at the surface.

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Several years ago, shortly after I began grad school, I came across a cartoon commentary on art and the art world entitled “Real” “Art” or “Mr. Grumpy Goes to an Art Museum and Comes Out Belaboring the Obvious,” written and drawn by Peter Bagge. It’s presented by Reason Magazine, which is a libertarian publication. That alone is reason for pause. And even just glancing at his other comics on the Reason site is enough to make me want to dismiss him outright.

But even though I can rebuke most of the criticisms Bagge lays out against the entire contemporary art scene, I fear that simply having found this comic was enough to help drive me down the road towards Cynicism City, where I now rent a one bed/one bath apartment.

So, to help expel the Bagge demons I’m being possessed by I’m going refute some of his arguments here. Due to space and time and spacetime constraints I’m not going to discuss the entire thing which you may want to read yourself to get the whole picture. (more…)