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• on July 27, 2010 Permalink | Reply

  Who shot Andy Warhol? 

  

  Valerie Solanas did. Author of SCUM, a feminist manifesto. Often referred to as the Society for Cutting Up Men. She used silver bullets. Or bullets coated in tin-foil. Andy Warhol was a vampire after all. I had never known who shot Andy Warhol. I knew there was a movie about it. I never watched it. I didn’t think I needed to know who shot Andy Warhol. But I do. Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol.

  Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic -minded, responsible, thrill seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex. Solanas in SCUM (1968)

  In the recent issue of October that focuses on Any Warhol, Catherine Lord writes about Valerie Solanas, in an article titled ‘Wonder Waif Meets Super Neutuer.

  Solanas didn’t like the term feminist.

  SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to achieve its ends. Such tactics are for nice genteel ladies who scrupulously take only such action as is guaranteed to be effective… SCUM will not subject itself to getting rapped on the head with billy clubs. – Solanas in SCUM (1968)

  Feminists were ‘daddy’s girls’. She was queer. Lord describers her as “not just a working girl, but a working class queer who was either behind the times or ahead of her time or who never really had a time or whose fifteen minutes turned out to be more like five.”

  American artist Carolee Schneeman credited Solanas with accelerating the “issues that would carry feminist theory and practice into our present moment”. Swedish author Sara Stridsberg wrote the book Dromfakulteten based on Salonas’ story. Delphine Seyrig and Christine Roussoplos made a video that documents Seyrig dictating the SCUM manuscript while Roussoplos types it up on an old typewriter.

  To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo – Solanas in SCUM

  Lord claims that “queer theory would not have happened without ACT UP would not have happened without the feminist movement. The feminist movement would not have happened not have happened without Valerie Solanas”. Lord also refers to curator Connie Butler’s 2007 exhibition “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to posit that “absolutely nothing in the twentieth century was more influential than the feminist movement”. So who shot Andy Warhol? Valerie Solanas did. And I should know about Valeri Solanas.

  
  Tags: act up, andy warhol, art (3), catherine lord, feminism, gender, journal article, manifesto, october, queer theory, scum, Valeri Solanas   

   

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• on January 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply

  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   

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