The Jackette

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• on May 29, 2009 Permalink

  Kevin Platt’s Invested Objects at Firstdraft 

  One night I climbed into a boat with a girl I loved. It drifted off. Soon the boat was in the middle of the bay. We climbed out and swam back to shore. On the beach we sat. Our clothes wet. And watched the boat drift for a while. Remembering when we were in it.

  

  Kevin Platt 'Nostalgia for the never known' 2008

  The first object Kevin Platt built was a boat. In Nostalgia for the never known (2008), Platt builds a boat, ties himself to it, and swims out to sea, towing the boat behind him. Platt created a vessel but did not enter it. He was building an object that could take him places. Instead he took the object places.

  In the exhibition Invested Objects currently at Firstdraft Gallery, Platt creates more vessels, but unlike the boat in Nostalgia for the never known, these objects suffer no illusion of functionality. They are only ideas of objects. Sketches of objects. Skeletons of objects.

  

  Kevin Platt 'Invested Object' 2009 (Photograph by Alex Reznick)

  The skeleton of a structure is something we build upon. But the skeleton of a body is what is left when the carcass rots away. Something we can remember the body by. The Invested Objects are both kinds of skeletons. They are structures we can stand outside of and build upon. Fulfilling sculptural blueprints, we can create our own vessels. Take them on our own voyages. Yet soon the imaginary disconnects from the object. We are left drifting in the bay. We climb out of the vessel. Stamp feet flat on ground and watch the imaginary vessel deteriorate before our eyes. We see only its skeleton. Then we remember the vessel. Remember when we were in it.

  When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void. … The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.

  Heidegger’s vessels come into being not by their frames, not by their sides and bottoms, but by their void. Their emptiness. Platt did not enter the boat because he did not want to fill the vessel. He desired the void to persist. In Invested Objects, Platt creates skeletal objects so that the vessel cannot be filled. Everything slips through. The void cannot be entered. Platt does this because he does not want to defile the vessel. Once Platt enters the boat and it takes him some place, the potential of the void, the vast emptiness it consists of, dissipates. To paraphrase Fitzgerald, by entering the boat, Platt’s count of enchanted objects would diminish by one.

  The Invested Objects are in essence constructions of Pothos. The desire for the absent being. A longing for something out of reach. Disconnected. Platt manifests this longing in his objects because he wants a permanent Pothos. He wants Pothos, which by its very nature is a transitory state, stuck in time. He wants to stall Pothos. So he creates objects that will always be unfulfilled. Objects that long to be something. Always wavering before the embrace. As Nicolas Rothwell writes:

  For if art is just its own pleasing, weightless thing; if it comes into being by our will and vanishes, like some particle in the cold depths of an experimental chamber, if it is doomed and transient, then nostalgia is all it is – the imprint of its own mortality, the catch in its breath, the false promises that lure us with their siren grace.

  Platt wavers in such anguish because of these siren songs. He knows that to follow those songs, to enter his vessels and fulfill their desires, will surely lead to a sort of death. So Platt creates only glimpses of objects, objects that are both doomed and transient, but objects that are also tangible enough that he can share whispers of that haunting song.

  
  Tags: boats, exhibition (2), firstdraft, heidegger (5), kevin platt, nostalgia, pothos, sculpture, vessels (2)   

   

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• on May 25, 2009 Permalink

  How postmodernism lost its cool 

  Postmodernism is so yesterday.

  That was the response I received on Twitter from ApostrophePong when I tweeted  about writing something on the representation of postmodernism in the media. I quickly typed up a reply insisting that I knew that postmodernism was ’so yesterday’ and that was exactly what I was going to write about. I didn’t want to sound out of touch.

  I didn’t know why it was so yesterday. I wasn’t too sure when today had begun and I wasn’t completely confident that I even knew what postmodernism was. I didn’t mention this of course. That would have been uncool. But how had postmodernism lost its cool?

  I thought I would start on the autopsy table analysing the corpse. Postmodernism, when you cut it apart, literally means ‘after the modernist movement,’ while modernism itself was originally used to refer to things ‘of the present’. In that sense, postmodernism should mean ‘after the present’. Postmodernism should mean tomorrow. Not yesterday. This meaning must be a bit muddled. We didn’t start traveling through time.

  In an effort to cement some kind of definition of postmodernism I scrounged around some postmodern texts about postmodernism that were written by postmodernists. Hal Foster wrote of a postmodernism that ’seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and poltical affiliations’ . Margaret Iversen wrote of a postmodernism borne of a postructuralism that is defined by its ‘resistance to meaning’ . My efforts revealed that the ghost of postmodernism past was having a great big belly laugh at my attempts to corner it into some sort of definition. I was only cornering it so I could discover how it died, but I soon discovered that the weapon I was wielding as I poked and prodded it into its corner, was in fact the weapon that had slayed it. A definition was used to murder postmodernism.

  The failure of all the student authors to appreciate the significance of the distinction between language and the use of language (and the determinism that is produced) was also closely bound up with their conception of the meaning of words. Nearly always these students treated abstract nouns as if they were the names of curious sorts of hollow objects. And ‘doing theory’ therefore consists of looking at ’society’ (another object) from somewhere imaginatively outside ‘it’, and seeing how the people who, as it were, have to live inside these hollow spaces are constrained in their thoughts and actions as a result.

  According to Gavin Kitching, the students at the School of Politics at the University of New South Wales have been allowing their Honours essays to be corrupted by postmodernism. The students were treating abstract nouns as ‘hollow objects’ devoid of meaning. By treating these words as such, the students had created a society of people living in hollow spaces where their thoughts and actions were constrained as a result. Generally I myself do not find hollow spaces too constrictive. If I were to enter an empty hollow room I could imagine many things I could do in that room. If I were, however, to enter a room with dictionaries stacked to the ceiling and covering every inch of the floor, I might find myself mildly constrained.

  Kitching’s theory  that there is a distinction between language and the use of language contradicts what Heidegger considers makes something some thing. Heidegger, in his essay The Thing , considered that the way some thing is used defines it as some thing. He continues to write that the void, or ‘hollowness’, that creates space for this use, is in fact what the thing is. He demonstrates this concept through the use of a jug:

  When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void. … The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.

  Abstract nouns, such as postmodernism, are just such jugs. They are hollow empty objects. The question is, though, what is the water that fills the jug? The water is the liquid meaning that flows in and out of these words, piped into our culture via the media. As Raymond Williams writes, our society (another abstract noun) is made by the finding of common meaning that is written into the land.

  Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind.

  The idea of liquid meaning flowing through the media draws parallels to Myra MacDonald’s Foucaldian reading of a media that operates discursively. But instead of the media manifesting versions of reality that can be accessed through ‘the constructivist prism of discourse’  I would consider that the versions are in reality.

  MacDonald writes that the media frames perceptions of reality, a reality that exists, but remains ‘profoundly unknowable’. She writes that by considering how these perceptions are constructed through the analysis of discourse we can still attempt to understand this reality as ‘refusing any attempt… because it is philosophically impossible to set an absolute criterion of truthfulness is… too rigid and extreme a position.’  She differentiates this kind of ‘unknowable truth’ from the ‘postmodern thinking’ of Baudrillard and his simulacrum because postmodern thinking ‘denies the point of positing any link whatsoever between media or cultural texts and reality,’

  I would disagree with MacDonald’s fundamental concept of reality that causes her to consider that Baudrilards ‘postmodern thinking’ that stresses the self referentiality of signs systems cannot be utilised in uncovering how the media forms ‘frames of understanding we construct in our head about the material world’ . The error in her concept of reality is in her emphasis of the material world. We live in a society and a world that is primarily constructed of abstracts. That is the reality. Media theorist, Vilém Flusser, writes that all forms of communication are constructed systems of signs . There is nothing natural about the words “I love you”. Marshall McLuhan writes that the content of the written word is speech, and that the content of speech is consciousness. We need to consider how the media shapes this reality of language, of abstracts. We do not need to consider how the media shapes the reality of chairs and trees or other objects of the material world. MacDonald is correct in considering that postmodern thinking ‘denies the point of positing any link whatsoever between media or cultural texts and reality’ , because postmodern thinking does not consider the two mutually exclusive.

  MacDonald writes that ‘words and images, by defining and labeling phenomena, frame the terms in which we think about these,’ but they do not frame the way we think about things, they frame how we think. By changing the way we think, they change our reality. The media does not perpetuate versions of reality, it perpetuates versions in reality. And why did postmodernism lose its cool? How did this reality change? How did it lose its worth in regards to Bordiu’s concept of social capital? It occurred because the hollow empty object was overfilled with meaning by the media.

  According to Sarah Thornton, one of the key criteria’s of ‘cool’ is authenticity. Dominic Strinati argues that authenticity is formed by a particular set of cultural tastes and values and not from any historical truth. I would argue that authenticity is formed through a half empty jug, through ambiguity. By being able to project meaning onto an ambiguous object an individual feels an object is authentic because it adheres to their own individual meaning. Once news media begins to fill the jug up with meaning through referring to the object frequently in stories the jug begins to be filled with outsiders manifestations of meaning. The object loses its authenticity for an individual and in turn loses its cool. But all this would be nought but theory if there wasn’t any empirical data, because with data comes ‘truth’ .

  

  Inspired by this graph depicting the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and ‘other stupid academic fads’ I decided to make my own graph with my own data. I scanned the archives of both JSTOR, the academic journal database, and the Sydney Morning Herald between 1987 and 2002 for articles that mention ‘postmodern’ or ‘postmodernity’. Postmodernism’s crisis of cool it seemed occurred in 1997 when the academic journals began to mention Postmodernism a little less, while the Sydney Morning Herald began to mention Postmodernism a significant amount more. The newspaper continued to increase its coverage of postmodernism annually while the journals coverage continued to decrease. The academic trendsetters started to retreat, they had kept postmodernism as cool as possible for as long as possible by embedding the word with ambiguity. Most of the articles couldn’t settle on a definitive definition, and every subsequent article argued against that earlier unsettled definition. The newspaper however, which avoids ambiguity because it compromises appearances of truth’, settled on a definition on January 7, 1997. The very date when postmodernism started being uncool. The ambiguity of postmodernism was keeping it from the honest unacademic folk:

  For the past decade or so, the dinner party circuit has been divided into three distinct groups: those who know about postmodernism, those who don’t know about postmodernism and those who pretend to know about postmodernism in a thinly veiled attempt to gain sexual favours from one or more of their dining companions. Clearly this situation is unacceptable. If you are one of these impressionable types who feel amorously inclined towards those  who confuse you, how are you to pick the real PoMo pundits from the pretenders?

  The article was titled simply Postmodernism. Written by Emma Tom. Its purpose was to define postmodernism and it enlisted an expert source, a professor of art from a sandstone university:

  Postmodernists reacted to styles of thought that were predominant in the ’60s, such as Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis and an approach to anthropology called structuralism. All these were known as master narratives: huge, elaborate stories that were supposed to explain absolutely everything. Other examples of master narratives include Christianity, capitalism and the idea of human progress. The postmodernists decided that these big stories were no longer appropriate, that it was not possible for there to ever be one story that explained everything. Explaining that nothing could explain everything was to take a great deal of explaining.

  The article filled the jug with meaning. Postmodernism was no longer incomprehensible, people could no longer imagine their own meanings of postmodernism. Their meaning was murdered. It had been usurped by the news media’s objective truth. It lost its ambiguity. It lost its authenticity. It lost its cool.

  
  Tags: baudrillard, cool, gavin kitching (2), heidegger (5), language (3), mainstream media, marshall mcluhan, media discourse, myra macdonals, postmodernism (2), sydney morning herald, twitter, vessels (2), vilem flusser   

   

• on January 27, 2009 Permalink

  The reproduction of music and the ritual of listening 

  I carefully placed the disc in its tray. Spinning the volume knob to the preferred setting of 24, I pressed play. Slipping out the album sleeve from behind the plastic clips, I flicked through the square pages. I looked at the artwork. I read the lyrics. I marked the satin gloss paper with my oily fingerprints. I lay down on my bedroom floor. I looked at the ceiling. I listened.

  Andrew Frost, from the Art Life on the ABC, writes that music is ‘software for the latest playback devices’ and that it has ‘become an almost worthless commodity’. He has a point. The thrill has gone. The hunting and gathering in record store shelves has succumbed to the ease of the search box and the one-click shop. I hear a song on the radio. I pick up my phone. I type the artist’s name. I click ‘buy album’. I listen to it for half an hour. I forget I own it.

  Frost proposes that it is the proliferation of music that has thinned its inherent value. Music is no longer rare, nor difficult to obtain. He writes that ‘the purchase of music has become a sordid and shameful gluttony’. We have become pigs with our snouts stuck in the troughs. The question is, do we need to starve ourselves of something in order to value it?

  Frost writes that art with its emphasis on the original object is able to resist the wholesale commodification experienced by music and that its cultural value is measured by more than its materials. He states that rarity is everything. He proposes that the proliferation of video art online and on the shelves of retail stores is hampered by the artist’s desire to maintain the artwork’s ‘aura of specialness’ by keeping the work as a limited edition, available to only a few discerning collectors.

  I as a video artist have chosen not to show my video works online, on youtube or on my own website. It isn’t because I feel that it will cheapen the works value through mass proliferation. It is because I want to control the experience of my work. I want the pilgrimage to the white walled temple of the gallery or museum. I want the quiet space. I want the artwork to belong to a cultural ritual that extracts the viewer from the ‘real world’ and places them in that other empty space. It is like listening to an album for the first time. The bedroom floor. The ceiling. There needs to be a ritual of escape.

  Listening to a new album while reading the paper or peeking at video art on youtube in between phone calls at the office does not belong to that ritual.

  We do not need to starve ourselves of something in order to value it. Rarity isn’t everything. Ritual is everything.

  The bread that is the body of Christ doesn’t lose its value to Catholics because it is eaten every other day of the week outside of Mass. It is is the performance, the ritual, the way the bread is eaten that gives the bread value.

  Installation art and the temple of the white-cube thrived after the age of mechanical reproduction because artist’s became conscious of the need to control the experience of an artwork, to embed a ritual in the work, in order to maintian the work’s aura. As Walter Benjamin wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

  The earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual…

  You can watch extracts of Andy Warhol’s Empire on youtube. The value of the work existed in the experience of sitting in a darkened theatre staring at a single image for 485 minutes. Warhol understood the value of this ritual of experience and barred any abridged screenings of the film such as this youtube video. The youtube video does not devalue the work just as a postcard of the Mona Lisa does not devalue the work.

  Jarvis Cocker also understands the value in the ritual of the experience of art. Cocker wrote instructions on how to listen to his 2007 album Jarvis.  He wrote:

  Warning!
  JARVIS should not be used as a sedative or an accompaniment to exercise.
  You may sit if you wish – kneeling is really not necessary.
  JARVIS can be broken into convenient bite-size pieces but probably works best when swallowed whole.
  Do not adjust your tone control, it’s meant to sound like that. It’s not LoFi or HiFi – it’s MyFi and hopefully YourFi, too.
  A song isn’t really a song until somebody hears it – so thanks for listening
  Remember! As always, please do not read the words whilst listening to the recordings

  The only problem was that these instructions were printed on the disc. If you purchased the digital version you wouldn’t have had any idea on how you were suppose to listen to the music.

  
  Tags: andrew frost, andy warhol, aura, digital reproduction, empire, jarvis cocker, mechanical reproduction, music, value (2), video art, walter benjamin, youtube   

  The Reproduction of Music and the Ritual of Listening | The Jackette is discussing. Toggle Comments

   

• on December 20, 2008 Permalink

  Existential exercise: the art of Heesco 

  “The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are invisible. This is evident. The force is closely related to sensation: it is enough that a force be exerted on a body, that is, on a specific point of the wave, for there to be sensation.” – Gilles Deleuze

  Pull up. The artist hangs as he lifts his body up. He carries his own weight. The force of his suspended weight, the pressure, is rendered visible on his face. His cheeks expand, his jaw clenches and his eyes and brow scrunch up. His body descends. He lifts himself back up. Tightening. Then releasing. The artist moves but remains static. Dangling there he lifts his head high for a moment before dropping down again.  He stays there in that same place. Struggling.
   

  

  Why does an artist paint a self-portrait?  I propose it is a form of resistance training. An artist creates, renders something visible, and that creation then exerts force upon the viewer. There is a sensation. An impact. But when the artist’s creation is an image of the artist themselves, the force of the artists own symbolic body impacts their physical body. The imagined self feedbacks onto the physical self. The act of painting self-portraits becomes an existential push up, or in Heesco’s case, a pull up. Heesco pushes his image away from himself , projects it on to paper, and then pulls his image back to himself, through the sensation of seeing his own projected image. The repetitive nature of Heesco’s series of self-portraits also enforces the idea that his painting is a form of existential exercise:

  I am / I show that I am / I see that I am / I am : 9 Repetitions

  It is evident from Heesco’s previous work that he considers existence as a choice. An exercise that one chooses to undertake.

  Heesco left Mongolia in controversy. He had self published a book with a friend that had the Mongolian press claiming as a guide to suicide. Only 150 copies were printed and were distributed mainly among friends and university students, but copies of the book found their way to government officials, and Internal Affairs, the equivalent to ASIO, started an investigation into Heesco.

  The book was called ‘Caffeine Deficiency’ and was a collection of short stories, poetry and illustrations about a group of teenagers coming to terms with a post-communist Mongolia. It reflected a disaffected and depressed generation that Heesco belonged to.

  “It didn’t say go and kill yourself really. It just portrayed our state of mind at the time, which was pretty bleak,” Heesco said.

  Francesca Alfano Miglietti writes that existence itself can be a form of artistic expression. The title of the series ‘Six Feet Over’ as opposed to ‘Six Feet Under’ demonstrates that Heesco views these works as representative of his survival, of not being pulled under. The works show the artist struggling against the weight of his own body, the weight of his own existence, dragging him under, into the darkness. An exit sign glows in this darkness, offering an escape, but the artist continues to hang. His face scrunches up and he lifts himself up. He continues with this exercise of existence.

  
  Tags: art, catalogue essay, existentialism (2), Francesca Alfano Miglietti, heesco, painting, weight training